Wednesday Photo: A winter's night on Christ's Pieces, Cambridge, in a hypernormal time

Taken with a Fuji X100F

Just click on the photo to enlarge it. 

Taken in December 2020. I remember that at the time I was very absorbed in (and hugely impressed by) the work of the Czechoslovak philosopher, Jan Patočka (1907-1977), and this photo somehow reminded me of photos taken there (and in Eastern Europe in general) during the 1950/60s. 

My worry is that the similarities I see in this image are not only aesthetic, but only too real. After all, here in a post-Brexit UK we find ourselves increasingly impoverished, being led by a government showing definite tendencies towards enacting repressive and regressive legislation and also experiencing a time of increasing hypernormalisation. And what, you may ask, is hypernormalisation? Well, here’s how Brandon Harris succinctly defines the word in the New Yorker: “an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.”

And, for those interested, here’s a short documentary about Patočka called, Socrates of Prague: