Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

This week's 'Other Voice': Covid Odyssey “Wherefore we find our adventurer Odysseus stirring, his patience at an end. His black ship is run down to the water. He calls for mariners” by John Griffin Who else senses the world shrinking around them? Was it only a year ago we could twirl a multi-hued globe and contemplate a trip to one of those inviting islets of colour? Now, such goals have become uncertain, hazardous, forbidden even. We are confined to our country, our state, our town, a backyard. An immemorial freedom is being curtailed. We began as a freewheeling species, nonchalantly strolling out of Africa. A hundred millennia later and a trip to the local supermarket will soon be a grand day out, and even this dependent on the whims of a president, a prime minister, a mayor. Are we destined to settle for Hamlet’s fancy, a world ‘bounded in a nutshell’? That feeling of confinement and frustration brought Melville’s Ishmael to the point of knocking people’s hats off in the street. Today, it’s masks. And so, to sea... Continued at https://losthorizons.com/N/132.htm#4, and followed by my important afterword.