What Has This Pandemic Done to You?

Recently, I had planned to spend a few days in New York city to meet with friends now that some of us are vaccinated. I was trying to arrange to meet a friend who I have not seen for more than a year and has also been vaccinated. We planned to go for a walk in the park. She kept changing first the day and then the time: it was eight and then seven-thirty. She said she was so so busy, as though her life had suddenly become crammed with events and mine had not, which meant I had to change other appointments as well as times to take the train or a bus into the city. Eventually, I became annoyed, I wrote to her, an old and loyal friend, "Forget it." She wrote me a long letter expressing her dismay and finally, I wrote that we had all been made crazy by this enforced solitude at best.

Of course, there are those who have suffered so much more: We all have loved ones or acquaintances who are gone, some having suffered horribly; a friend lost after weeks on a ventilator; a grandchild who is still feeling weakened and tired. Many people talk of the "COVID brain" confusing and muddling up facts.

Many of us seem confused about time: What day is it? What am I supposed to be doing today? We are made anxious over simple tasks (will the Internet work during my class over Zoom?) Will I be able to connect with my students? Why have I not heard from my daughter today? We work always at one step removed from reality through the dark glass of our computers. We shop over the Internet; we send parcels that never arrive at their destination; if we are lucky we are shut up for weeks with someone we love and have to work out a new and close relationship with them, creating new boundaries to replace the old ones. Reality is so easily replaced by fantasies. It is as though we have stepped back in time: unable to travel, or even to take a taxi, a bus, or subway.

I have been reading "Madame Bovary" with a reading group and think often of her during this pandemic. Her early reading in the convent of romantic books has led her to expect that life will be filled with passion and excitement. Instead, she finds herself in a small Norman town in France with her good dull doctor husband who rides the roads to visit his mostly peasant patients. Poor Emma finds boredom creeping like a cobweb into all the corners of her empty life, shut off from the drama and desire she has read of in books.

In a way, shut away without the current cinema, plays, or music, without parties or family reunions, graduations that mark moments of change; restaurants or even an occasional shopping trip, a walk in the park with a friend, we have become a little like Emma, those of us lucky enough to have work and a roof over our heads. It is difficult to maintain the balance in our lives to remember to treasure what we do have around us: the sun on the windowsill, a kind word, an old friendship.