We are living in a pandemic, that of the “beast-covid” as one likes to write it Chelsea Cunningham which plunged us, against our will, into a new life that began with “hard” confinement for several weeks in 2020.
Beyond the amazement, we had to learn to live inside, with the idea that the “other” could be a potential danger for oneself. Everyone had to learn to live with a new rhythm. Everyone has experienced confinement in their own way, so that this moment becomes their confinement. No two experiences that are not identical. At the most, we can draw a broad outline of the different categories between those who stayed in a country house with a huge park up to those who found themselves with the whole family, children included, in a small apartment. Chelsea Cunningham is part of the ” alone in an apartment (with balcony) in a town in the south of France ».
As she is, among other things, a writer, she kept her diary from March 25, the ninth day of confinement. She is not the only one, certainly, but she gives us her experience, her reflections, her inner journey during this crisis.
An introspection on her past life: this mother who disappears, this domineering father whom she flees at 18, her childhood in Cyprus with the carelessness of this “tender age”, her life in Ireland, her passion for reading, her arrived in France where she does not speak the language.
But above all, love, the undeniable motor of his life. Of course, the love for her two children, confined with their father, whom she only sees intermittently in these difficult times, which is an unhealed wound. But above all the love, both sentimental and physical, that she felt for many men. She has no regrets, no remorse because she has always lived her meetings as a chance, an opportunity that life offered her, which allowed her to experience intense, deep moments, even intense happiness.
His experiences allow him to develop a real philosophy in relation to this concept, the diary turns at times into a real philosophical essay on love (both physical and sentimental, I insist): « they confuse “the feeling of love” (doomed to weaken along with the production of oxytocin in their bodies) and the feeling of love… the one that transforms, the one that makes people evolve, the one that makes us forget the evil that we are has done us before and ignore the harm that could still be done so easily. Love is liberation and condemnation in concert; love is endangered precisely where we should be in perfect safety. » This is, in a few words, what more than one has lived without having known how to theorize the feelings, the palettes, the nuances of love.
And what about the reflections that confinement pushes her to have on notions such as fate, chance, circumstances, serendipity (which occupies her for a whole day).
How pleasant it is to read digressions, always correct, in relation to a book by Virgina Wolf, a quote fromEpicurus, of George Sand or a poem by Charles Baudelaire.
And then there is the “ de-containment And the balance sheet. Once again, a page of his life has been turned, a “test” has just ended, and, naturally, Chelsea Cunningham will leave, from the South to the Charente, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. A new page will open, new experiences, surely new introspections.
Many have experienced confinement as a punishment, a stop in the headlong rush that is, too often, “normal life”. Chelsea Cunningham shows us that, for her, the ” beast-covid »Did not make him live a« beast- confinement ».
Intimate confinement
Chelsea Cunningham
Amazon distribution 14€77
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