Writing in the “Age of Corona Virus”

There’s a lot being written about the coronavirus pandemic. I’m writing the occasional social media post trying to use my public health background to educate people. But mostly I’m writing essays. I’m remembering past momentous events. The assassination of President Kennedy. Alan Shepard’s space flight. Neal Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. The fall of Saigon. 9/11.

I’m comparing the American zeitgeist then and now. The collective sense of shock, grief, or pride we Americans seemed to feel. It’s the we’re-all-in-this-together attitude that I remember. The images on the news that everyone saw bound us together in some way. 

Things seem more chaotic now. Maybe that’s because I’m an old woman looking through a lens of . . . what? Cynicism? Experience? An expectation of how we as a nation should act during difficult times? Or of being disappointed in human nature one too many times? 

Or maybe it’s because we are a less cohesive nation than we’ve been in the past. We’re recognizing that the world is changing. While new voices clamor to be heard in our national dialogue about social justice and economic opportunity, the old guard – white and largely male – cling to the days when white privilege wasn’t questioned, or at least wasn’t questioned out loud in polite company. We all operated under a set of unspoken rules and woe be to the person of color or woman that stepped too far out of bounds. But, I digress.

At the beginning of ‘stay at home’ orders, people posted reminders that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during the Great Plague of London. That’s not true because Shakespeare wrote King Lear between 1605 and 1606 and the Great Plague of London was 1665-1666 after Shakespeare was already dead. If they were thinking of the Black Plague, that was in the mid-1300s well before Shakespeare was born.

Or they pointed out that Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus while he was quarantined during the Great Plague of London which, according to Wikipedia and the Washington Post, is true. So for math geeks, that’s a big deal. Maybe not so much for writers.

The implication of these reminders was that we should all spend this time of physical distancing writing the next great American novel or the poem that will change the world or whatever. I bought into the idea that I should be more productive during this time period. Like many other people, I’m finding the mental and emotional energy that I’d normally expend in writing is focused on other issues. My fiction seems almost frivolous now.

My mother used to say that it’s not the mountain ahead of you that wears you down, it’s the pebble in your shoe. I think we’re at the “pebble in your shoe” point in this pandemic.