Some of us practice thermal resistance: we don't wear summer clothes in April. It is an irrational impulse that begins every morning in the privacy of the closet. Then you wonder why this closure, seeing your reflection pass by in a shop window. Is it a rebellious drive or a denial of reality? We are cowards, incapable of throwing black paint on the symbols of the responsible bodies (the responsibility for taking global anti-pollution measures is not ours; what we could do is vote carefully). We are recognized in the streets because we wear long sleeves, long pants and a sweater hanging from the waist like a poor monkey. It does not occur to us to go in suspenders. It would be like abandoning ship.
We are the resistance of the rag, confused people. And when we come across people in shorts and sandals, so fresh, we feel a strange uneasiness; the situation is new, the sensations too. We would like to hold these people by the shoulders and try to make them understand – neither do we – why it seems treasonous to us to stick our toes in the air in April. This crushed spring deserves a respect. A mourning.
In those, I'm on the phone with a friend and he asks me what I'm writing. I summarize these lines. I prefer not to know if he is in shorts. I explain to him that now I am about to introduce, in this topic of environmental confusion, the case of a great hundred-year-old oak, a dying icon of a town. A wonderful tree that is being devoured, from the inside, by a bug. The law decides to save the life of the insect, in extinction, at the expense of the tree. As much as the people of the town have the centuries-old custom of going to kiss under those magnificent branches, which, right now, could fall on their heads (it is said that there are locals fumigating in secret).
“Don't you think that we would be a bit like the bug that eats the tree, metaphorically speaking?” I ask my friend. “That insect is fulfilling its nutritional function to survive, nothing comparable to our free destruction of the environment; we can choose ”, he replies about to snack on my article. But I am no longer so sure that we can choose a less destructive way of life, since we do not.
