After Lockdown. Bruno Latour

is a common noun that we hope to find just about everywhere in the Universe, ‘Life’ would be a proper noun designating this Earth and its so very particular organisation. But that would run the risk of introducing a new misunderstanding since the word ‘living’ is so much associated with the word ‘organism’. Happily, to avoid confusing planet earth with a small e, common noun, and Earth with a big E, proper noun, I have up my sleeve a technical and scholarly noun, taken as so often from the Greek: Gaia, which happens also to be, for better or for worse, the name of a particularly fertile mythological figure. We won’t say, then, that terrestrials are on earth, common noun, but that they are with Earth or Gaia, proper nouns.