Spending days in animal ways
Pacing life in a pandemic
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall
. . .
you can die for people—
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
Yesterday - April 26 - marked the 48th day since my quarantine began. I spend my days restlessly: I wake; I leave my bedroom - which doubles as my office, since I share my house with two other people - and head to the kitchen, where I boil water for tea. I work from 9 to 7; I spend much of that time pacing between the bedroom/office and the kitchen; sometimes I open the door and check for mail. Other times I open the back door and step onto the porch, and breathe in frustration dressed as resignation.
I might be comfortable with loneliness, because it is my native condition; I might be accustomed to living a small life, because you cannot be inducted into military service or other forms of institutionalization without having that planted soul-deep; but now it just aches and chafes. I want to hold someone’s hand; I want to touch someone, hug them, hold them close and breathe them in just as they breathe me in.
It hurts me that to breathe someone close in to me might mean death. We are social creatures — yes, even us, the lonesome ones who stand off to the sides, just yearning to be embraced — and the quarantines severed that suddenly. One day, we went to cafés and bars and grills and slice joints and laughed and drank and wooed and swooned; the next we huddled as death swaggered in taking the old and young and those in between, full of life, and then gasping and begging for it and then surrendering it in shuddering, gasping, pleading breaths.
Living is no laughing matter: you must take it seriously. Nazim Hikmet wrote those words, knowing what it meant to be confined; he wrote those lines a decade into a nearly 30-year prison sentence for sedition. It’s easy when faced with death - unreasoning, unrelenting death, especially that coming inevitably, relentlessly, like this death has - to be avaricious about your life and its chances, to hoard it dragon-like. But that is not living; that is merely existing, and we are greater than that.
So, you wonder: who are you, writing these words? I’m Raf; this is the Miscellanies, a newsletter about interesting things and life and everything in between. Won’t you stay a while and read?
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The quarantine will continue; it will recede; and it will return. Let me repeat that: the quarantine will continue; it will recede; and it will return. Once more with feeling: the quarantine will continue; it will recede; and it will return.
Wait: let me back up. I’ll paraphrase a story about perseverance. The main character? Jim Stockdale. You may have heard this story before, in which case — feel free to skim.
Before we got to know him as a seemingly hapless vice presidential candidate in 1992 - which does him disservice - Stockdale was a highly decorated naval aviator. He was also a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Not just any POW, either; Stockdale was a high-value prisoner, which meant his captors brutally tortured him and kept him in solitary confinement. He was the highest-ranking military officer in the Hanoi Hilton; tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner's rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again.
He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda.
His captivity — and more importantly, how he persevered and got through it to the other side — gave rise to a concept named after him: the Stockdale paradox. Stockdale himself put it best:
"You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
In other words: it's the idea of hoping for the best, but acknowledging and preparing for the worst.
In a conversation with author Jim Collins, for Collins’ book Good to Great, Stockdale elaborated on this. From Collins’ book:
If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture.
Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
The picture above is of people getting tested for Covid-19 antibodies here in New York City. It’s from a Gothamist story, titled “Antibody Tests Can’t Guarantee Immunity—But New Yorkers Want Them Anyway”. From the story:
Will Compernolle spent an hour waiting on line for an antibody test outside the MedRite Urgent Care in Clinton Hill on Thursday, hoping to get some closure. He had recently recovered from a prolonged bout of fatigue and a lost sense of taste and smell that his doctor had diagnosed via video appointment as COVID-19.
“If I got confirmation, I would still proceed cautiously with my life, but would be a little more confident about marginal decisions like when to go to the grocery store or see my girlfriend,” said Compernolle, an economist who lives in Brooklyn. “I knew there was some uncertainty about the accuracy of the test and how long antibodies last, but I feel like I’m in limbo and want to know whether I had it or not.”
—
David, a paralegal from Crown Heights who went to get tested at the Clinton Hill MedRite on Friday, says he suspects he had a mild form of the coronavirus in March.
“I’ve read the news that nobody knows for sure that there’s immunity or that it’s long-lasting, so I’m not really sure it will make me feel that much more secure,” said David, who declined to give his last name. But he said he believes a positive test result might come in handy in the future.
“When it comes time to go back to work, I have a feeling that people who can prove that they've already had it will somehow get preferential treatment to be able to go and move around, and I’m hoping that this will help,” he said.
—
“I’m curious and, of course, I’m hoping I had it and I’m past it and maybe I can go back to some sense of normalcy,” said Ari Benami, 56. He added that he also hoped to contribute to the statistics about the virus, “so, generally, we will know what’s going on.”
“The more tests we do, I guess the smarter we are about this,” Benami said, “and hopefully we can get out of the lockdown soon.”
I think you can see where I’m going with this: these are all people who, like me - like you - desperately want the quarantine to end. To escape the lockdown; to live our lives again, to go back to “normal”. Who are grasping at anything and everything in hopes that this waves arms vaguely and generally will all end soon. It’s not just people in New York City, either. This is national in scope.
Researchers tracking smartphone data say they recently made a disturbing discovery: For the first time since states began implementing stay-at-home orders in mid-March to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, Americans are staying home less.
The nationwide shift during the week of April 13 was relatively slight. However, any loss of momentum, particularly when stay-in-place orders remain in effect across most of the country, has some public health experts worried about “quarantine fatigue.” Any increase in travel, they say, is premature when staying home remains the most effective way to limit the spread of the virus until widespread testing and contact tracing become available.
“We saw something we hoped wasn’t happening, but it’s there,” said Lei Zhang, lead researcher and director of the Maryland Transportation Institute at the University of Maryland. “It seems collectively we’re getting a little tired. It looks like people are loosening up on their own to travel more.”
Zhang said he anticipates the number of people staying home will continue to drop as some states begin allowing businesses, beaches and other public facilities to reopen. That process began last week in South Carolina and Georgia.
Public health experts say any data showing widespread public resolve or cooperation beginning to wane is noteworthy. Because this is the first U.S. pandemic in 100 years, they don’t know how long people are willing to tolerate cabin fever for the greater good.
Look at this:
We want this to end. Desperately. Except it won’t. Councilman Mark Levine points out the implied and misguided optimism in these quotes in the same story:
“I’m certainly worried that people will get a positive antibody test and feel they have some superpower or armor and no longer take precautions about covering their face in public or limiting contact with people who are vulnerable,” said City Councilmember Mark Levine. “That would really be unwise.”
Gothamist not only points out the lack of certainty in their headline, they detail it in their story, which you should read even if you’re not in New York City. Read it because this story details what people who are locked down are longing for deep down inside.
God, I hope this all ends soon. Hey — they’re doing antibody tests at the 7-11; maybe if I have the antibodies, I can go back to livin’ life!
But don’t just take it from this story. Here’s Robert Lee Hotz in the Wall Street Journal detailing the scientific thinking:
So far, most medical researchers who have studied coronaviruses related to the pathogen that causes Covid-19—including SARS, MERS and the common cold—are confident that people who do recover gain some immunity to SARS-CoV-2, based on preliminary studies and case reports of the new virus. They don’t know yet whether that protection will last a few months, a few years or a lifetime.
“The arguments are that a protective response to SARS-CoV-2 will last somewhere between 6 months and 60 years,” said Martin Hibberd, a specialist in emerging infectious diseases at the U.K.’s London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Any time the immune system encounters a new virus, it tailors a custom defense by orchestrating a system of cells, organ and tissues. The strength and longevity of those defenses are affected by heredity, sleep, diet, stress and hygiene, to name a few factors, medical experts say. All play into the levels of protective antibodies a patient can produce to ward off infection—and under the right circumstances, that immunity could last a lifetime.
Under its own pressure to survive, some pathogens can evade those immune responses by gradually mutating until they are unrecognizable. Infection by the virus that causes measles confers lifelong immunity, for instance, while the influenza virus mutates so rapidly that new infectious strains of flu emerge almost every year.
SARS-CoV-2 has a mutation rate of less than 25 mutations per year, compared with influenza’s mutation rate of almost 50 mutations per year, according to an analysis by computational biologists of the Nextstrain consortium, based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and the University of Basel in Switzerland. That gives researchers hope that any natural immunity or vaccine would offer more lasting protection, said Pamela Bjorkman, a virologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies viruses that cause AIDS, influenza and Zika.
That’s a table from the article detailing our immunity to various viral illnesses. Look at where SARS-CoV-2 - what we call “the coronavirus” - falls in that chart. First, it’s not singular: the coronavirus is one of a family, along with the common cold. Second: the length of immunity is fairly short. The common cold only lasts for six months, which is why it’s, well, common. MERS lasts for nearly three years. We don’t know where Covid-19 falls yet.
That’s why the range Dr Hibberd gave — six months to 60 years — is so, so wide. The fact that it seems to mutate half as much as the influenza virus is good; the fact that it’s a coronavirus, not so much.
We simply don’t know.
We don’t know. Unfortunately, American society doesn’t do uncertainty well. It craves certainty and stability the way a three-pack smoker craves a nicotine fix. This is why people are getting antibody tests.
And this is why it would behoove our responsible state, local, and national leaders, such as they are, to hammer this idea home until we ache from its repetition:
Let’s hope for the best, but acknowledge and prepare for the worst. This is the new normal. The past is gone, and it’s not coming back. The quarantine and pandemic will continue; they will recede; and they will return. And we will get through this, by carrying each other.
I can’t say enough good things about Bookshop. If you like reading, and you’d like to support your local bookstore, as opposed to Amazon, then you owe it to yourself to shop for books there. Signup here.
A lot of this email was grim and hard, so I owe it to you to give you hope. How We Reopen — mathemusician Vi Hart is working with a bipartisan group of experts working on a pandemic response plan.
Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same — in these uncertain times, we're here for you.
This Website Will Self-Destruct — if 24 hours pass without new activity, the entire database of over 24,000 anonymous messages will delete itself. I left a message; will you?
surf.city — "a live network of 20 streams dedicated to nature, music, and things that fascinate". This was really soothing for me; I hope it does the same for you.
I am really looking forward to this Thursday: “Parks and Rec” cast reuniting for one-off benefit special set in pandemic.
Jay-Z raps Hamlet — from Vocal Synthesis, a YouTube channel dedicated to audio deepfakes like Sinatra singing ABBA.
Drive and Listen — simulate car trips in cities around the world with street noise and radio — if you really miss “normal” or The Before Times™, you should peep this.
Here’s Harry Styles to close us out and take us into this week.
I love y’all. I hope you had as restful and calm and good a weekend as you could, given all this. I’m here for you; we will get through this. We’ll lean on each other and carry each other. It’s OK to be sad and angry and feel like this will never end. I feel that way too. And I love you all, and that’s what will see us through: our fierce love for one another, embodied in our kindness and compassion for each other.
Hit me up by email; call me, maybe.