Sunday, April 5, 2020

Sheltering at home

Michael Dirda in a couple of recent reviews, here and here
For much of the country, sheltering in place over the past three weeks has been a wearisome but essential civic duty. We don’t want to get sick ourselves, and we don’t want to bring any sickness to others. So we stay home. It’s the right thing to do.

But where or what is home? According to one old saying, home is where the heart is, and, according to the Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer song, it’s anywhere we hang our hats. A much less elegant truism can be traced back to hokey versifier Edgar A. Guest: “It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.” ....
And
You would think that a guy who has spent decades with his nose in a book ought to be used to radical social distancing, to being alone day after day. In fact, the past two weeks have been hard. ....

While sheltering in place, as we all should be doing, I’ve sought temporary respite from anxiety by reorganizing the garage and culling the Smaug’s hoard that passes for my library. Every evening, though, I find myself considering a second beer until I think, “Why stop at two?” At night, staring into the darkness, I frequently recall far too many friends, colleagues and relatives who now live, often quite vividly, only in my memory. Given half a chance, I can grow impressively maudlin. ....

Pascal famously said that all our miseries derive from our inability to sit quietly alone in a room. ....

Still, aren’t there books that might help us cope with isolation and long periods of self-quarantine, that could even show us how we might thrive, not just survive, as involuntary shut-ins?

The first work that immediately comes to mind is — no surprise — Daniel Defoe’s survivalist bible Robinson Crusoe...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. I will gladly approve any comment that responds directly and politely to what has been posted.