書き出しだけでもチェック

先程のスピーチでTSエリオットの荒地の書き出しApril is the cruelest monthに触れていましたね。リチャード３世のNow is the winter of our discontentではないですが、不吉がことが4月に起これば使いたくなるフレーズです。

April was Trump's cruelest month

BY ELIZABETH DREW  MAY 4, 2020

WASHINGTON – T.S. Eliot famously called April “the cruelest month.” If U.S. President Donald Trump, not known as a fan of poetry, were honest with himself (another unknown), he would likely agree the month turned his tenure into a wasteland.

By April 28, the U.S. was leading the world with nearly 57,000 COVID-19 deaths and over 1 million confirmed coronavirus infections. A recent analysis by the Yale School of Public Health indicates that the number of pandemic-related deaths in the early months of 2020 far exceeded the official public estimates.

こういうのは引用だと分かるように明示してくれるものです。

Coronavirus Briefing: The cruelest month, with occasional rays of light and a bit of baseball

April 16, 2020 by Deborah Stoll

Today’s Coronavirus Briefing is 1,101 words and will take you five minutes to read.

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote the poet T.S. Eliot, who knew nothing of coronavirus but did know the 1918 influenza pandemic all too well. This current pandemic whipsaws us daily with the grimmest imaginable news interspersed with glimmers of hope. We’ll vote for hope any day (sending ballots by mail, of course).

MS. GEORGIEVA: Thank you. I send my very best wishes to everyone for health and strength, and a big shout out for the health workers out there to protect us against COVID-19.

It is the words of T.S. Eliot, "April is the cruelest month," I want to start from. Yes, nature is reawakening, but streets and schools, and shops, and offices are empty. And the pandemic continues its deadly march around the world.

As I said during my curtain raiser speech, it is a crisis like no other. In scope, we are now in the worst recession since the Great Depression, we are experiencing a 3 percent contraction of global GDP, and 170 countries are going to see income per capita falling versus what we expected three months ago for 160—for them to go up.

It is also very unusual as a combination of a health crisis and an economic crisis that is simultaneously a supply and a demand shock, and while we are accustomed in crisis to live with uncertainty, this time is the novel coronavirus new unknown we're wrestling with.

For the first time in the history of the IMF epidemiologists are providing inputs for our macroeconomic projections, and they're telling us it may get even worse if the virus continues its round for longer, or if vaccines and treatment are slow to come around.

ついでにちょっと前に触れたA Tale Of Two Citiesの書き出しも有名なので見ておきます。It was the best of times, it was the worst of timesの部分がよく登場します。

APR 27

A Tale Of Two Cities: Seattle And New York’s Response To The Pandemic

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.