Poppies

Against the backdrop of murderous decisions taken so far by the powerful, as compared to the selfless sacrifice of our key workers, the pandemic confirms Proust’s observation that `undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is “the commonest thing in the world”; it is human kindness. In the most distant, the most desolate corners of the earth, we marvel to see it blossom of its own accord, as in a remote valley a poppy like all the poppies in the rest of the world, which it has never seen as it has never known anything but the wind that occasionally stirs the folds of its lonely scarlet cloak.’ - Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Pt 2 trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Everyman, 2001), p. 97.