The Warmth of a Lost World

The current title of the article is "Is It Strange to Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers?" but as documented at the bottom of the page, it was originally published in print in the Sunday Magazine with the title "The Warmth of a Lost World," which I found to be a more apt (and less clickbaity) title for the article, which only briefly touches on the pandemic towards the very end and spends much more talking about the simple embrace of physical pleasures that the Western world somehow shunned.

Some lovely writing. I really like this observation about urban living:

> When we lose the ability to live among the bodies of strangers, we don’t just lose the tribal solace of company, but the relief from solipsism — the elbow brush of other lives unfurling just beside our own, the reminder of other people’s daily survival, the reminder that there are literally seven billion other ways to be alive besides the particular way I am alive; that there are countless other ways to be lonely besides the particular ways I am lonely; other ways to hope, other ways to seek joy.