Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

George Prochnick is the author of numerous works, including In Pursuit of Silence, Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, and the forthcoming book Heinrich Heim, writing the revolution.

In this essay, sirens are filling the streets of London, as George recalls a revolutionary

poet's account of the 1832 cholera pandemic that unfolded in Paris.

While watching history repeat itself in devastating refrain, he wonders,

what is hysteria? What is necessary passion and courage? How can we respond loosely,

compassionately, as this disaster progresses?

Early one morning, before London went into lockdown, I walked up Parliament Hill, an elevation in Hampstead Heath with a panoramic view of the long city skyline.

That day, the bowl of the sky was grey, but a band of light across the southern horizon steeped the buildings in yellow. Sickly, jaundiced, I found myself thinking.

It was as if the infected state of the city had been revealed through some color-coded medical test.

In that eerie luster, the skyscrapers themselves, which often appear brash and dramatic,

looked just like splinters of ruined pilings after a grand pier had washed away.

While I stood there, the wail of ambulance sirens seemed nearly constant. I hadn't heard anything similar since 9-1-1 in Manhattan.

In the throes of a calamity, we reflexively find echoes of our predicament in the conditions of the natural world,

just as we reach to memory for prior events that chime with our present-day experience.

Both impulses speak to an urge to discover order and meaning, even a sinister correlation in moments of chaos.

This desire is not wrong, but we might do well to focus that wish for greater significance

on the larger social order we ourselves have constructed in the here and now.

Instead of reading omens in the heavens, we could study

the patterns of human relations that have been thrown into relief by our general loss of

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