When someday this long affliction
will have broken up, like ice,
it will be spoken of
as of the Black Death;
and children on the heath
will build a man of straw
to burn delight from suffering
and light from ancient dread.

Gottfried Keller
The public slanderers

Thomas Mann quoted Keller’s poem in an essay he wrote after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. It seems equally apposite today, but I wonder bleakly whether the hope that our present day affliction will break up is less certain.