This is The Guardian.

By Jacqueline Rose, read by Serena Mantigi and produced by Hatty Moyer.

We have been asked to write about the future, the afterlife of the pandemic.

But the future can never be told.

This, at least, was the view of the economist John Maynard Keens,

who was commissioned to edit a series of essays for The Guardian in 1921,

as the world was rebuilding after the First World War.

The future is fluctuating vague and uncertain.

He wrote later, at a time when the mass unemployment of the 1930s

had upended all confidence.

The first stage on a road to international disaster that could, and could not, be foreseen.

The senses in which I am using the term uncertain, he said.

Is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain,

or the price of copper and the rate of interest 20 years hence,

or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth owners

in the social system in 1970?

About these matters, there is no scientific basis on which to form any

calculable, probability whatsoever.

We simply do not know.

This may always be the case.

But the pandemic has brought this truth so brutally into our lives

that it threatens to crush the best hopes of the heart,

...