Editor-in-chief
Lara Lychagina
Yesterday, “The Far & Beautiful Future” seemed to be hiding beyond the horizon, and we considered the world we lived in to be boring, fussy, and far from perfect. Today, our Yesterday has turned out practically immaculate or ideal, just as well. Travelling, working, socializing, enjoying a glass of wine in a restaurant, or exchanging smiles — unmasked — all that remained in our happy Yesterday.
COVID-19 has put the planet on hold and misplaced many notions that seemed hard & fast, so happiness, friendship, dreams, and life itself are perceived quite differently now. Perhaps, we’re beginning to realize the world of our Yesterday was perfect while now it’s braced for the rest of the story. Just a while ago, blockbuster heroes — the last samurai or boy scouts — saved the world, wiping off all the enemies & bringing peace to whole cities or even planets single-handedly, arms in hand. Turning away from the screen, we heaved a sigh of relief, “Ours are the winners!” In the meanwhile, somehow or other, those just doing their regular work without thinking themselves to be heroes now were never viewed as such. Every day & every hour of day & night, they are working hard to bring back our usual and, as is clear now, ideal world of Yesterday, when we knew not we were happy. Now, the world is being saved by health professionals and volunteers. This issue of THE WORLD is dedicated to them. We do hope the voices of those fighting on the line of fire Today will help those who’ve lost hope for Tomorrow. We’ve interviewed medics working in Moscow, Lisbon, Paris, Yerevan, Rome, New York City, London, Zurich, and Tel-Aviv.
The world has changed instantly and dictates new rules. Keeping our social distance, we photographed our heroes via FaceTime. This photo project has transformed into an online exhibition echoing through the Moscow museums. For the first time ever, something so far from ideal has given birth to such a big & resonant project. This new kind of photography has raised an unexpected question: what was so wrong with our Yesterday and all its ideal relations, companies, families, and quality? All our lives we have been striving for perfection only to find ourselves in an unknown world. It’s a reality with borderlines between life & death, heroism & routine doing one’s duty, the happiness of just living & dreams in bright wrappage erased. It’s a place where a boundary-free world, as already usually perceived, has narrowed to the limits of a household.
Ideal times over, there come times unideal, maybe more humane since everything ideal, i. e., brought to perfection, is most likely artificial. Some time or other, man should have ended up in the blind alley of constant racing for improvement. Jean Baudrillard’s idea of “The Perfect Crime” is clear: once the world is made perfect, the world is over & done as it cannot become anything else. The lockdown has shown us there’s “an otherness” while the world we lived in was as fragile and vulnerable as an eggshell.
There’s a parable about Tibet monks for many centuries trying to decipher 9 billion God’s names. They kept trying, even knowing that once the complete list was known to man, the world would be no more. Perhaps, we are not supposed to know all God’s names. Maybe, we must let the concealed remain secret. In the meantime, when we feel so bad that we cannot breathe while our planet’s normal pulse fails, it’s probably time for us to realize that we, too, could become a bit God-like if we understood that the very life of everything alive depends on us. Here & now! Tomorrow may never come, if we don’t get it Today.
Writing this letter, I did not know if this issue would become a reality, whether I’d find business partners to support it and let our readers have a chance to hear the voices of the new times’ heroes. Anyhow, if you’re holding this issue in your hands, our efforts have not been wasted, and we’ve managed to make these 15 heroes known to the new unideal world, still ours, though. Here & now!