Consider the caterpillar: wooly, ruddy, creeping at the pace of an old man with a cane. It knows it has to die. It wants to die. It finds a snug spot and builds itself a shroud out of its own body. It goes into deep sleep — as far as a caterpillar can tell, an eternal sleep.

And pretty soon, at just the right time, a butterfly, as light as a soul, in all the beauty due youth, breaks out of the cocoon, dusts itself off and flutters into the sunlight.

I confess I swiped that lovely metaphor of transformation and resurrection from Brazilian philosopher and theologian Rubem Alves. He used it to make the point that, for something to be born, something else must die. That’s what change is.

He wasn’t thinking about pandemics, but the principle applies.

The virus and the isolation will bring about a lot of change. A way of life — actually, millions of ways of life — will die. New ways of living will be reborn from the old ways. We will transform. We will become something that we are not now.

Things work out well for the caterpillar. It becomes something beautiful. No longer crawling, it flies.

But does that apply to people?

Will we accomplish the same upward transformation when we emerge from our quarantine cocoons? Will we continue to be an empathetic society, people as concerned about infecting as getting infected? Will we find new strength as we rebuild? Will we fly?

More specifically, will we learn we can work from home, maybe even work fewer days? Will we start new kinds of businesses? Will we learn how to help schools by extending education to the home? Will we be more careful about what we believe? Will our values be a little different?

Will we appreciate the banal — the endless bounty of store shelves, the walk in fresh air, the chummy get-togethers, children running around in the sun like inebriated butterflies?

Or will be go back down to the dirt of contention, self-interest, false logic and faith in the fake?

In the Tarot deck there is a card called The Tower. It’s a powerful Higher Arcana card that depicts a forbidding stone tower as it is hit by lightning. Flames lick from the windows, and people tumble into a dark and stormy night.

But the tower itself does not fall. Only its façade cracks and flakes away. The death of the façade reveals an inner truth, an insight into reality, exposure of what was hidden, the disappearance of illusion.

It’s a good card to get in a reading, but not without trepidation for those who cling to the fraudulent façade of appearance.

Another Higher Arcana card, Death, also presents a deceptive image, a skeleton in dark armor on a pale horse. But the card does not refer to a tragic end. It predicts a radical, sweeping change, a rising to a higher level of existence, a better understanding of the world. The card means to say that there is no end; there is only change — the death of one thing, the birth of another.

The pain and in some cases true tragedy of the pandemic will force us to change. We will learn what we can live without. We’ll treasure toilet paper over caviar. We’ll have a better understanding of what’s important. We’ll appreciate people and public spaces.

We’re already bursting with thanks for the medical professionals, for the people who stock the shelves, for the truck drivers, for the under-paid who are suddenly essential; in a certain sense, they’re all butterflies we’d never noticed.

And when this is over, we’ll be thankful for friends and strangers just because they’re among us. We’ll be thankful for the waitress, the librarian, the teacher, the wooly, ruddy old man with a cane smiling at the little butterflies running around in the sun.

Glenn Alan Cheney is the managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.