Vox Felicitas XIII — A New Dawn
On last week’s episode of Vox Felicitas, I made it my business to introduce you to my other passion than writing stories (and indeed blogs, which could be considered stories in their own way). That passion was history, and it was introduced in the form of an essay I wrote in university on Jean-Jacques Rousseau — specifically answering the question of whether or not he was an “anti-Enlightenment figure”.
In today’s episode, I want to write to you about a different topic altogether. In my habit of counterparting articles preceding new ones: where VF12 was about the past, this one broaches the future…
Today, the tenth of July 2020, I had my first driving lesson in four months.
Under normal circumstances, this isn’t anything especially interesting to talk about. The overwhelming majority of young people have driving lessons, with the exception of those who are blind, missing a limb or are otherwise poorly disposed towards manipulating a one-ton block of steel and aluminium travelling multiple times faster than a horse. So what makes this driving lesson so special above all others, I hear you think?
Well, unless you’ve been actively avoiding the news or have been living in the wilderness, you may have been made aware of an unpleasant bug that’s been making its rounds worldwide. The outbreak of this bug has forced Britain and most of the rest of the world into a state of lockdown ever since the tail end of March — a lockdown that’s kept people (me included) cooped up in their homes for a quarter of a year. Well, most people, anyway.
Now that the threat of coronavirus is beginning to subside, the world is starting to return to a kind of normal. I say “a kind of normal” because it’s too soon to discern the exact effects of the lockdown upon wider society in the future. For one, the lockdown has proven the viability of remote working to major corporations whose employees have relied upon it to conduct their business. The effects of that alone on office culture, and the wider economy of the entire world, could be revolutionary.
Even apart from the coronavirus, the start of a new decade has brought some interesting challenges to the forefront of the world. In January alone, Australia’s wilderness caught fire, an Iranian general lost an argument with a plane, and Britain finally left the European Union. Then last month, race relations in America struck a new low with the killing of George Floyd (which I discussed in VF9). To many, the COVID-19 pandemic has been but the sour icing on a cake made out of pain.
But those of you who’ve been riding this wave with me since the beginnings of Vox Felicitas, conceived just as the lockdown set in, may remember the fundamental message I conveyed in the first episode. I said, when our V-E Day comes, we will breathe our sigh of relief and come out of this crisis better than we ever were before.
The world is emerging from lockdown. Our V-E Day is closer to us now than it has ever been. History has been viewed in terms of decades for as long as anyone remembers. The Roaring (Nineteen) Twenties, the Swinging Sixties, and whatever in God’s name the eighties was supposed to be — the list goes on ad nauseam. Post turn-of-the-millennium, the age of the Internet has taken hold, the Voyager space probe became the first man-made object to cross interstellar space, America elected its first black president in Barack Obama, and the tireless work of Greta Thunberg has brought climate change back to the forefront of peoples’ minds.
To say nothing of what’s to come. Thanks to the likes of Elon Musk, electric cars and space travel are becoming increasingly affordable. NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. ITER — the world’s biggest nuclear fusion reactor project — is scheduled to come online in 2025, the first phase of experiments on the ultimate source of clean energy. These are but three expected breakthroughs to be made by humankind throughout this decade — as you can imagine, as one who dabbles in sci-fi, I like to read about technological developments like these.
We are truly witnessing the beginning of a new dawn. I have no doubt at all that the future of our world will be as bright as the light at the end of the tunnel I first described in VF1. And it is on such a book end that I announce that I’m retiring the Vox Felicitas name from this ongoing blog, effective next week.
Don’t worry — this bombshell doesn’t mean I’m quitting blogging altogether. Far from it. Vox Felicitas was conceived as a means of spreading happiness throughout a dark time. However, all darkness must eventually be overcome by light, whether the sun after a long, cold night or an archaeologist’s torch illuminating the undiscovered tomb of an ancient emperor. Now that the light is here, Vox Felicitas is all but obsolete in its purpose. Perhaps it will return when the next global crisis invariably breaks out, though opinions on this matter would be more than welcome.
Functionally, I’m doing this because I want the creative freedom to explore topics outside of the purview of happiness. Things like character analyses, political discussions and explorations of historical events — insightful topics otherwise quite prickly when approached under VF’s narrow banner. The articles produced on this site will continue to be approached with my usual diction and, dare I say, humour — where appropriate, of course.
A new dawn indeed, and not just for the world, but for me as a writer too.
Thank you for reading, and I will see you all again next week.
~ Harry