Classics in a Time of Quarantine
Romans Stay Home as Coronavirus Shuts Down the U.S.
The pandemic that we’ve seen coming for months, that has taken over life and death across the world, is upon the U.S. As confirmed cases and fatalities rise, schools and cities close, and the stock market crashes, no American — even our Denier-in-Chief — can avoid it.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last week in a state of mounting anxiety and isolation. Maybe you’re teaching this semester and had to scramble to bring courses online within days. Maybe you were all set to take exams, finish a chapter, or make rent, and you suddenly lost your campus, your job and insurance, your only place to sleep and eat. Maybe you had a campus visit scheduled, a conference paper prepared, spring break planned. And now, you’re trying to work from home while self-isolating and caring for loved ones, wondering whether you have enough toilet paper and our world will ever be the same.
No, it won’t. In the short and long term, people we love will get sick and die from COVID-19. We’ll have to radically reinvent our ways of sustaining ourselves, moving through the world, eating, passing the time. And after the dust clears and the financial consequences become evident, life as we know it —along with higher ed — will change forever.
So what can we do, as classicists, in the face of all this uncertainty?
It’s frustrating when action feels a lot like nonaction. As we try to “flatten the curve,” limit community spread, and free up hospital beds for those who need them most, we’re entering into collective self-isolation on a scale never before seen. As national borders close across the world, our personal lives — recently so full of movement, variety, society — have similarly shrunk to fit within four walls and the people they happen to contain. (As someone who travels frequently to structure my research and writing, I’m feeling the change acutely: after a recent trip to the Bay Area, I’m midway through a 14-day home quarantine in Wisconsin, with upcoming travels cancelled or postponed.)
But from here on the couch where I’m grounded for the foreseeable future, let me tell you (in part to tell myself): we classicists, we’ve got this. We’ve been preparing our whole lives. Not only is classical history and literature full of exile and redemption, ingenuity in crisis, proof that our minds are all the empire we need, and we’re all citizens of one universal republic. All this time, we’ve been cultivating the mental skills we need to endure this novel pandemic through our shared exile from the past. What is classics, after all, if not a battle of wills against distance and disaster? The hope that from (shared) suffering comes knowledge?
So for the next few weeks — while our campuses and public spaces and normal sources of human interaction are closed— Romans Go Home will become Romans Stay Home: more frequent, shorter missives from my exile to yours, with a classicist’s perspective on this most modern of crises and some practical thoughts on staying steady and productive. Think of it as your own personal one-woman Decameron — and please write me or comment below with ideas or suggestions for future columns.
One thing this virus can’t take away is the republic of letters of which Eidolon is one pillar. Plus, I’m lonely and at loose ends, and maybe you are too. So bunker down, chin up, and tune in to Radio Free Classics.
We’re going to get through this, together.
Things I’m grateful for today
1. Technology
We classicists have an unfair reputation as luddites. But as we race to transition to online teaching and meetings, we’re all painfully aware of technology’s limitations and insufficiency as a substitute for human contact. Some worry we’re on a slippery slope toward a more digitized, depersonalized instructional future. We suffer as much as our students from lack of in-person interaction. As I confer with friends about conferences recently cancelled or moved to Zoom, I notice that the papers were never what we were most looking forward to: it was the chance to bump into people, grab drinks and chat, to feel a community around us, wishing us success.
But think of all we do have compared to prior generations who suffered through ancient Near Eastern infectious diseases, the Antonine plague, or the Spanish flu: the means to understand what’s happening to us and to stay connected without spreading contagion. As I think of Boccaccio’s Florentines, sheltering in place and trading stories among bubonic fleas and rats, I’m grateful for the sanitary escapism of streaming media: the return of Westworld, the documentary Cheer, films like Roma or Cold War that make small screens feel big. I’m also appreciating the least-used function of my smartphone: its ability to make calls. This is the perfect time to scroll through your contacts and ask someone you haven’t caught up with for a while to join you for a stroll or quarantini, together, apart. Even if they have their hands full, they’ll thank you for thinking of them.
2. Friends and colleagues
I’m impressed with the communities of support I see forming online. People are generously sharing practical advice on everything from keeping your kids’ minds and bodies active to putting your classes online in a hurry (including this list geared specifically toward classics). Liverpool classical list members have thrown open the doors to free online Greek instructional videos, research Webinars, and a MOOC on Greek and Roman cities. Take advantage of all this free-floating moral, technical, and intellectual support to do things you probably needed to do anyway. The hours you spend now learning how to calculate weighted grades on Canvas will save you time in some distant future when date nights and babysitters return.
This crisis is a chance to strengthen local, not just long-distance friendships. As my quarantine gives me new appreciation for Ovid’s hunger for contact from exile, I’m thankful for everyone who offered help in real life when our car got a flat tire or they had Clorox wipes to share. It’s comforting in these disembodied times to lend a helping hand, even deliver lunch to someone’s doorstep. I can’t wait to reciprocate once I’m cleared.
3. Hobbies
Classicists as a rule are pretty comfortable on our own, burying hours at the library in rabbit holes that will yield just one footnote. In times like this, obsessiveness— even our ostrich-like reluctance, much mocked by civilians, to extract nose from book to observe the real world — can be a blessing. As one friend of mine crowed, “I’ve been practicing ‘aggressive self-isolation’ for years!” If you have unexpected time on your hands, use this as a chance to reconnect with the things that drew you to classics in the first place. (Re)read the Georgics, the Faerie Queene, or Proust, just for fun. Start a reading or writing group to keep you motivated (productivity tips in a future column). And catch up with your other hobbies: that scarf you were knitting for your niece, books you bought in a pique of interest and then never cracked, albums you haven’t heard in years (or the many concerts of comfort now posted online). When we can no longer casually step out the door, we can still step out of ourselves — and quicken the clock — by doing what we love.
4. Animals
If there’s anyone who’s actually happy about the pandemic, it’s our furry and feathered friends. I bought this window birdfeeder to amuse my indoor cat, and its visitors are now the highlight of my day, too. The feline in question has never gotten so much uninterrupted attention or lap-lolling time, and it’s going to her head. She should be warned, though, that my dog-envy is reaching new heights: what better reminder that every day is a new adventure, that you are loved and needed, that you need to stop moping and go out for a walk? If you don’t have a pet, maybe now’s the time to adopt one. I have a friend who just did, and her puppy photos are my second favorite thing on the internet right now — after these penguins (or these!) exploring their newly deserted digs. (How about assigning your Latin students a short composition on their comfort animal, à la Catullus 2?)
5. Our local communities
We are all suffering, and many will die, from our president’s criminal refusal to take rational steps to prepare for and contain COVID-19, when U.S. intelligence was fully aware of the crisis and rich donors were being pre-warned. But I’m amazed by all the state, local, and college leaders who’ve stepped into the breach and worked tirelessly to protect us, often with minimal guidance from above, amidst contradictory information, prioritizing people over their bottom lines. Their closure announcements and policy revisions — products of long and difficult debates behind the scenes — can seem hesitant against the dire news drowning our screens. But as the spouse of a leader of UW-Madison’s emergency response team, writing from a living room that’s now command central, I’ve never been more impressed with my institution or the people who run it. For the last two weeks, they and their counterparts have been working 16-hour days and responding to fast-changing data and directives to safeguard our (not just the institution’s) health, safety, and future. For all that’s wrong with higher ed, our universities have led the nation in prioritizing and protecting communities during this pandemic, and I’m proud of them.
Right now, I could write an ode of thanks to the grocery clerks who keep stocking our shelves. But nobody will be more deserving of our gratitude, in the future-periphrastic struggle that looms, than our health care workers. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who blew the whistle on coronavirus, was mourned as a hero (and just now formally un-censured). Last Saturday, people across Spain and Italy coordinated on social media to mount mass applause, from their separate apartment balconies, for medical workers. This video from Madrid brought tears to my eyes and brought home the gravity of what we’ll be confronting in the coming weeks and months. Since weeks may intervene between diagnosis and hospitalization, Europe’s today is our tomorrow — and not everyone is singing. So if you know someone on the front lines, send them a care package now; they’ll need it soon.
For the time being, as our worlds narrow and darken, as our streets grow quiet and we limit our trips to the grocery store, I find myself grateful even for the simple gift of running into a friend or neighbor on a walk. Without discussion or complaint, we preserve a six-foot distance as we ask (and actually care) how we’re doing; refuse our human craving for a hug, on the knowledge that pulling together, for now, means staying apart. I’m moved even by this unspoken, everyday recognition that we all have a part to play in this global effort.
This is what it means to be a community in 2020. Our worlds are not ending, they’re metamorphosing. Our shared fear is also a great collective hope, that solidarity will win over selfishness to stop this pandemic. I’ve always loved that scene in Casablanca where the refugees at Rick’s bar drown out the Germans by singing the “Marseillaise.” I used to think our fallen century offered no more noble moments for the soul. But I dare you to listen, without crying Casablanca tears, to our fellow humans at windows across the world, joining voices in song when we can’t join hands.
Nandini Pandey is buckling her seatbelt and putting on her oxygen mask.
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