There’s a pretty incredible internet thing circulating right now, that I must share here. It’s an excerpt from an LA times article that was written during the 1918 Spanish flu, but it may as well have been written FOR US. As opposed to copying and pasting, I’m going to transcribe it below, because that seems like the best thing to do with the next 6 minutes of my life.

‘In a Little Town. Not much may be said in favor of the Spanish flu, but it has brought us back to the restful conditions of a Little Town. You who were so dependent on the movies, the theaters and the cafes for your nightly entertainment have been thrown back upon yourselves. Denied the consolation of the crowds, you are offered the satisfaction of getting acquainted with your families and friends. Since Broadway is not permitted to fling amusements at you, you must laboriously invent some for yourselves.

We who have had the inestimable advantage of life in a Little Town will not find the task such a difficult one, after all. There is that long neglected French, begun and dropped half a dozen times in as many years. For the same number of years, or even since we move from Poseyville, we have been promising ourselves the pleasure of reading The Decline and Fall of Something straight through. Now our golden opportunity has come. Let the flu rage and the microbes cavort — we are safe at home, with the fire crackling merrily on the hearth, all the windows open (as per instructions,) the big book on our knees. When we don’t read we doze, which is well, for we stand in great need of that doze.

Open the piano, wheel out the bridge table, brew the lemonade and let us take cheer with our own. We shall find that life holds joys and compensations quite out the movies and the cafes, and that, though our streets our now darkened, our homes are full of light. Life in a little town is not so bad.’