How We Live Now – Ben Okri essay for the New Statesman

Ben Okri explores how lives have changed since the beginning of the pandemic.

Death hovers over us all

For the first time in living memory I am alone with myself. I don’t have to go out. I don’t have to show off. I don’t have to spend money. I don’t have to dress up. I don’t have to keep up appearances. For the first time everyone is almost in the same condition as me. The rich are locked in their houses and the poor are locked in their council estates; our situations are different, but our condition is the same, because death hovers over us all. It’s true that the poor and the blacks and health workers are dying more than the others, but the others are dying too. We’re all afraid of this death that hovers outside, in the air, but we are all afraid differently… Read the full monologue on the New StatesmanWebsite