The pandemic is unsettling. It has disrupted our lives. It makes everything harder. We're worried and scared of getting sick. We're worried about our friends and family. Worst of all: unless we're in essential workers, we have to stay in isolation. This, I have found out, is extremely difficult for most people. (This isn't about me: I know I'm weird.)

It's difficult for parents, because aside from the worries, keeping children entertained is a full-time job, and stressful. It's difficult for people with elders to watch out for. I'm writing this on 1 April, and Reverend Richard Coles has already told this story on Twitter:

I cycled to mum's to fill the bird feeder. I looked through the french windows to where she sits, but she wasn't moving, the Daily Telegraph scattered around her. "Mum!" I said, knocking on the window, "MUM!" And she opened her eyes and mouthed 'fooled you'.

Richard Coles

Keeping a sense of humour probably helps in these times.

One thing you've probably noticed by now is that when isolated, people tend to become more themselves. Isolation isn't really a transformational experience. The condition merely removes a lot of the effects of societal influence. What's left is closer to the 'real' person: what they're like when nobody's looking.

You can write about that, you know.

The trouble with him was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick and ready in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their meanings.

Jack London, 'To Build a Fire'

'Marooned three years agone,' he continued, 'and lived on goats since then, and berries, and oysters. Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do for himself. But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly – and woke up again, and here I were.'

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.

Marcel Proust, 'Swann's Way'

I spend many a happy hour turning over a mass of ideas new to me as I stroll along, taking short steps – short steps so that I do not fly into the air on account of my relative weightlessness. As a young man I was absorbed by scientific study. These few days, this holiday I have given myself, have opened up new horizons for me.

Pierre Boulle, Garden on the Moon

That last quote comes from a narrator who is the only person on the moon. It's a suicide mission. He plants a garden. I really recommend that book, which Boulle wrote in 1964. It's an amazing imagining of the space race, written while it was in progress.

It's obvious from each of these excerpts that what fictional aloneness does is reveal character. Which is what it does in real life, pretty much. Wherever you go, there you are.

It's something to ponder on in isolation, and maybe put to use in all that writing you're no doubt doing during your copious downtime. Me, I'm staying as busy as I always am, which tells you a lot about my usual lifestyle.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

20.04.20 Front Page

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