In times of crisis, we are reminded that human beings are first and foremost the animals that are aware of their own death. But the impossibility of experiencing death shouldn't lead us to nihilism. Ethics transcend mortality and scorn the risk of death.

Suddenly, thanks to the Covid 19 global crisis, our relationship to nature has been altered. We are confined to our castles, large or small. Nature is now all outside us: it is no longer that sphere through which we wander, stare at in aesthetic detachment or endeavour to master and exploit. On our few permitted solitary outings we discover that it is newly eerie; has sunk back into a primordial past where it is better able to flourish on its own without us. In the face of the uncanny, we retreat with half-relief to our enforced enclosure.

But on the other hand, nature has also become more proximate. Our castles are also our hutches. When we do converse with others, electronically or at a safe, shouted distance, then the everyday chatter that Martin Heidegger affected to despise has suddenly merged with that authentic daily confrontation with our existential fate which he recommended. That of which we constantly speak is suddenly our shared human destiny: we are now surrounded by nature as potential death and so we are thrown back upon our own natural finitude. No longer do our careers nor our diversions seem to count for so much. What instead impinges, hour by hour, are our existential and animal exigencies: birth, death, life together in kinship and nurturing-huddles and tribal proximity.