How to Stop Worrying and Write through the Pandemic

Lessons from Ovid’s Exile, with Ten Practical Tips

Nandini Pandey
EIDOLON

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J. M. W. Turner’s 1838 oil painting Ovid Banished from Rome, with thanks to John Miller for posting.

Every March 20 since grad school, I’ve thrown a birthday party for my favorite Latin poet, Ovid. Some years, I’ve ordered cake and invited students to come read poetry; others, I’ve filled friends’ glasses with champagne cocktails. This year, I marked the occasion with a solitary glass and a couple friends on Zoom. It’s an illustration of our changed times, but also the Metamorphoses’ great theme that “all things change, nothing dies.” And that’s not the only reason Ovid speaks to us classicists in quarantine now as never before.

The times, they are a-changing: omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Missing and wishing well all the people who helped celebrate birthdays past.

The defining event of Ovid’s life was his 8 CE exile from Rome to the Black Sea town of Tomis, for what he cryptically characterizes as “a poem and a mistake.” The poem in question is surely the Art of Love, whose tips on sex in the city defied Augustus’ pro-marriage program. The mistake remains mysterious. Did Ovid sleep with Augustus’ granddaughter Julia, exiled that same year? Did he glimpse some imperial indiscretion? Or did he never go into exile at all? (The Blade Runner fan in me secretly loves this fringe theory, if only because it highlights the poems’ role in filtering our sense of truth.)

Whatever actually happened, Ovid’s poems from exile — the Tristia (“sad poems”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from the Black Sea”) — construct a powerful literary reality. They reframe Ovid’s whole poetic output as a contest over fama between himself and Augustus, one that Ovid wins by outliving Rome itself in his verse. They also show us how this most cosmopolitan of poets processed his forcible removal from the city, society, and pleasures he loved. And by refracting our current troubles through an ancient lens, Ovid can help us make a little more lemonade from our own unasked-for exiles.

I planned to spend this week in Birmingham, giving and hearing papers and thanking CAMWS for recognizing my book on poets’ interpretive freedom within and upon Augustan Rome. Stuck instead in self-isolation together with so many of you, writing my own Epistulae ex Monona, I’m newly appreciative of Ovid’s insights into the psychology of social distancing. Far from being “monotonous,” the exile poems are kaleidoscopic, almost populous in their variety, as if Ovid lightens his loneliness by giving his hundred inner voices all a turn with the stylus.

Out on the fringes of empire, Ovid is often desperate for companionship, anxious for his safety, whining about an endless winter that freezes even wine in the shape of its jar. (I’ve been to Pontus myself to lay flowers on his purported grave, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t last a day here in Wisconsin.) He daydreams of his wife and friends, the sights and sounds of the city, all the dinner-parties and theatrical shows and triumphs he’s missing out on. His one hope of staying connected to Rome — and keeping his memory alive — lies in entrusting words to book-rolls which must wait months or years for a reply if they even survive the perilous journey. Ovid’s repeated pleas for imperial forgiveness, his offers of poetic service, meet only radio silence.

At other times, though, Ovid is defiant. He insists in Tristia 2 that Augustus has misread the Art of Love; if anyone behaved badly after reading the book, it’s on them, not the poet. The idea that the individual mind is the ultimate arbiter of meaning is more than an alibi. It has profound links with the Stoic belief that while we can’t control external circumstances, we can be masters of our own minds. It’s still empowering, as our world spins out of control, to remember we remain in charge of how we read a poem, how we judge our leaders, how we handle our exiles.

This theme is Ovid’s antidote to depression, and the trump card he plays to win over those ultimate arbiters of his literary fate, his readers. Witness his noble effort, in Tristia 4.2, to “see” a Roman triumph a thousand miles away:

All this, I, far removed, will observe in my mind, as I can:
my mind still has a right to the place that was snatched from me:
it travels freely through immeasurable lands,
and reaches the heavens in its swift flight;
it draws my eyes into the middle of the city,
and does not allow them to be deprived of so great a good;
and my spirit will find a spot from which to view the ivory [triumphal] car:
and so, for a short while at least, I’ll be in my homeland.

The poem exalts, over any triumph the emperor might celebrate, the triumph of Ovid’s imagination over physical constraints. And while the exile’s geographical separation from the city is one symptom of the emperor’s growing power over Roman lives and speech, it also illustrates every subject’s retained freedom to flip the tables, at least subjectively, on imperial dominance. Sure, Augustus could uproot Ovid’s body. But from Ovid’s perspective out in the sticks, it’s Augustus who looks distant, disembodied, a collective dream that can’t control what people think or say or do. It’s a long way chronologically, but a short one in sentiment, to John Donne’s remonstration with the rising sun for interrupting a night with his lover: “I could eclipse and cloud [you ] with a wink, but that I would not lose her sight so long.” There’s nothing like a little room, a “world contracted thus,” to frame the planetary sovereignty of our minds.

As we shelter in place, in the U.S. and around the world, we have much that Ovid would kill for: e-mail and phones, round-the-clock news, central heating, our homes and families and language communities. Above all, we still have each other. Ovid feels his loneliness more keenly against all the fun he imagines his friends still having, without him, in Rome. We have no FOMO because we’re all missing out together: on weddings, sports, graduations, even the simple pleasure of deciding where to drink or dine. As I said last week, our digital and psychological proximity despite physical distance is one of the unexpected gifts of this pandemic. It’s forcing us to stretch our imaginative muscles, learn to “see” one another more clearly in our minds’ eyes, rethink what compassion and global citizenship can mean.

Thanks, Bobby Xinyue, for providing and patiently explaining these memes.

And the Stoic advice to control our mental response when we can’t change our circumstances, the poets’ insistence that our minds can eclipse the world, extends the fragile hope of reimagining our quarantines as no big deal, even opportunities. Trapped in a palace that felt like a prison, Hamlet hashtags these self-help clichés at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so … I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

It’s that last clause that’s the killer. We can try all we like to blow Stoic bubbles around our COVID-19 containment, but outside stimuli will keep intervening to pop them. In our case, it’s not bad dreams but the nightmarish certainty that hundreds of people like us, parents and children who might as well be ours, are dying every day alone in isolation wards, while we watch the numbers and panic mount from a distance. We’d be inhuman to ignore these, as Hamlet was to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths in cruel proof that thinking can’t get you out of everything.

And this, I suggest, is why Ovid strikes all those shifting stances in the Tristia and Ex Ponto. He’s staging his own repeated failures to rein in his racing mind; his lapses into anger, anxiety, and self-pity; the desperation for his friends’ embrace that topples each briefly-held heroic pose, like a cheerleader tumbling from the top of a pyramid. Ovid knew that Stoicism wouldn’t save the day: to err, fear, stress, sulk, to mind what’s going on, are only human.

What Ovid does demonstrate for us classicists in quarantine is a different, more pragmatic way to cope: the therapeutic power of writing.

Now, don’t get me wrong: we all need to focus first on the essentials. It’s way more important to take a walk, or call your mom, than to process words. And there’s too much pressure on us already to be productive, to somehow never miss a beat, as this unfolding cataclysm breaks our hearts and routines.

But when the universe is collapsing in flames, there is a certain solace in building new little worlds on the page. In ordering words, wrestling thoughts into sense, giving fixable form to chaos when we can put right so little else. In reaching out from our own isolation to fellow humans in theirs, by a means that’s no substitute for human contact, but that’s managed on occasion to survive “Jupiter’s anger, fire and sword, the gnawing tooth of time.”

That’s what Ovid’s exile poems teach us: the consolation not of philosophy, but of poetry, in its original, almost magical sense of making. I add some practical tips below on finding a process that works for you amidst the current corona-constraints, whatever your career stage. So give it a shot, if your mental wheels are spinning like mine and you need somewhere to put that nervous energy. It’s worked for me in the past, and it’s what I’m doing now.

10 Tips + 1 Plea for Writing through Quarantine

1. Prioritize

In these stressful times, there’s so much else you can and should prioritize, your loved ones and physical and mental health among them. So you have my permission not to stress about writing, too! But like most things on your to-do list, writing won’t get done unless you make an active choice. A friend once observed that when we teach classes, we’d never skip one day because “we couldn’t squeeze it in” or “we weren’t in the right headspace.” Why don’t we take writing just as seriously as part of our jobs? Sure, teaching yields quicker payoffs, and reading’s an easier way to feel productive (see #6 below). But if (like me) you process what you think largely through words, then make writing a daily habit. Start by scraping just half an hour from your schedule to avoid that build-up of guilt that comes from not opening a document in days. In time, you’ll come to look forward to and find more time for the resultant endorphin rush of productivity, just as you’d make time for physical exercise.

2. Manage distractions

If you’re just starting to build a healthy writing routine, or if you’re going crazy staying in place without coffee or book runs to break up your day, I recommend the Pomodoro technique. Using any number of handy timers, spend 25 minutes actually and only writing, 5 checking your phone/email/the latest pandemic numbers, then repeat as time permits. This helps interval-train your mind to work in shorter bursts, since the uninterrupted hours we think we need to write as students turn out to be as rare in real life as chimeras. Advanced version: if you can answer an email in a few seconds, do it. Anything that’ll take longer, unless it’s urgent, save for a dedicated hour when you’re not going to get much else done.

3. Get the timing right

Do a productivity inventory and figure out when (and where, #4) you get the best writing done. For me, it’s right after I wake up, before I’ve started mentally engaging with the day and the terrifying news that’s accumulated overnight. I save tasks that require less focus — research, grading and class prep, panic — for later in the day. You could spend infinite time on any of these, with diminishing returns, and probably do most in your sleep. Use your highest mental octane to get words on the page, and let necessity schedule the rest.

Miles from other people amidst cranes, eagles, and ““vast waters frozen with ice” this weekend at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge.

4. Switch (mental) spaces

Normally I advocate writing in a variety of spaces — changes of scene can break mental ruts. Since leaving the house for non-essential purposes is now a distant memory, be creative in carving out productive zones from the limited space you have. Even a change of orientation or lighting can do the trick; if you work from bed, as I do, turning around by 90 or 180 degrees won’t ruin your sleep hygiene. Switch between workspaces, go for walks, get dressed like writing’s your day job to keep your thoughts and days moving. And if you live with others and still have a paycheck, use some of the money you’re saving right now on eating out and entertainment to invest in noise-cancelling headphones.

5. Try new tools

The workspace on your screen matters, too. With normal life on hold, this is a great time to try out new tools. Maybe it’s post-dissertational PTSD, but I’ve come to resent Microsoft Word: the linear tyranny of its scrolling pages, the instant writer’s block I get from a new document, the way it’s hard to reorganize sections but easy to repeat yourself and over-annotate. I’m currently experimenting with Scrivener, which makes it simpler to move sections around and view them alongside one another and your notes. If you’re a visual thinker like me, their 30-day free trial could change your creative process. I also find PowerPoint useful for grouping visual and textual evidence into section-sized slides. When I gave talks, back when that was a thing, I’d present various chapter sequences to audiences to figure out which ones worked best. And I love starting Medium “stories” to jot down ideas for new pieces. The layout beautifies even the roughest notes into thoughts worth cultivating, and helps me think in shorter sentences and paragraphs.

Lola models the comfort we classicists take in confinement.

6. Put down the book

Classicists love reading almost by definition. But one of my least favorite things about this field is our tendency to measure people’s worth by the size of their bibliography, and not what they do with what they’ve read. Sure, the dissertation requires you to demonstrate you’ve digested a sufficient amount of content to satisfy 4–5 people who also endured this trans-generational hazing ritual. But just as my cat seeks security in her carrier after a traumatic trip to the vet, even Ph.D survivors continue to suffocate our writing under citations, footnotes, and qualifications through a self-fulfilling anxiety that we’ll never have anything really original to say. Our field’s collective delusion that it’s possible to be “comprehensive,” and desirable to try, is the enemy of good writing. It also translates into a pathological reluctance to move from the reading to writing stage that’s doomed many good classicists’ progress toward degree or promotion. With over two thousand years of scholarship behind us, we’ll never finish reading everything we could before we write, or we’d all be dead before putting pen to metaphorical paper. So read and write simultaneously, rather than in stages, and do some of each every day.

Many of us never had one last chance to raid the library before our campuses shut down. Ominously, my loans have been auto-renewed through June. But for every physical library that’s closed, another online resource has opened up: enough to help you get a sense of how you might intervene in current scholarly conversations. (While you’re at it, check out and add to this growing list of online teaching resources in classics.) Use this chance to chuck the scholarly monographs, get back to your primary sources, and think your own way through them from scratch. How much stronger and more sinuous our arguments could be if we always built their skeletons and musculature first, before fleshing out the footnotes! When this quarantine is over, I’d love to see a baby boom of lively, well-ventilated prose that doesn’t smother inspiration under bibliography. (Though yes, you still need to listen to your advisor.)

7. Be yourself

As a grad student, I was terrified that some senior scholar would ‘scoop’ my ideas, until my bemused supervisor assured me she’d never seen that happen. I now better appreciate that no two people’s projects are ever quite the same. Even if you’re working on a well-studied author, you bring your own way of framing the problem and understanding the evidence, your own mental library and embodied experiences in this world. So embrace the perspective that makes you unique, and don’t waste time modeling your thinking and writing after the abstruse if not incomprehensible styles that prevail in academia. (Do learn from writers you like to read; even Vergil stole the club from Hercules.) My own dissertation was rife with semicolons, qualifiers, and footnotes that I thought made me sound smart; full of (over-)explanations and signposting that killed suspense and blocked forward flow. Then I spent years un-learning these bad habits, un-writing my dissertation, and realizing — in good part through Eidolon — that unpretentious, personable prose is a hell of a lot more fun to read and write. That’s why I advise my students, if they’re blocked, to write out their thoughts as a casual email, then edit and nuance from there. And just as Coco Chanel advised looking in the mirror and taking off one thing before you leave the house, there’s no draft that wouldn’t feel more chic, more sportif, with a 15% trim. Less is more. Trust your reader, and wield the blade.

8. Create communities

Scholars often forget that writing is an inherently social endeavor, aimed at communicating with others. Sharing your drafts with test readers before sending it for review can be a constructive, even transformative step in the process — and it got many of us (including me) through grad school. Plus, most of us are better at honoring promises to others than ones we make to ourselves. Build daily accountability with group texts to set goals. For longer-term, more substantive feedback, writing groups are a great way to reconnect with old friends or kindred spirits from conferences past. Trading comments on Google Docs can replicate the feeling of conversation across shared self-isolation. Volunteer to circulate your draft earlier than you’d normally let it go, because we could all fuss indefinitely over comma placement, but it’s after we get feedback that the real work begins. Even the best pieces need some revision, and you’re in a better position to really change and improve if you haven’t already labored for hours polishing every sentence. I’ve learned to love that magic moment when I hit “send,” because then my writing becomes someone else’s problem, and I can work on something else for a change. By the time comments come back on the first piece, I’ve built the mental distance to edit it with clear eyes. Having projects at different stages in the pipeline also builds variety and anticipation into my workflow — things we could all use as this pandemic unfolds “at the speed of both light and molasses.”

9. Reverse-engineer

Writing’s a lot easier — both pragmatically and psychologically — when you have a specific output and audience in mind. Early in the process of planning a new piece, identify appropriate platforms for publication, then use their samples and specifications to guide your writing. Why waste your time drafting 20,000 words if the journal you’re aiming for won’t print pieces over 10K? Why write conversationally for a venue that favors formal philological studies, or vice versa? As I was conceptualizing my current book on Roman diversity, a wise Byzantinist helped me realize that if I want to reach a crossover audience I’m best off keeping the manuscript short, to 6 chapters of only 15,000 words each. By helping me delimit the project’s scope early on, she saved me years of unnecessary research, writing, and trimming back down for length. Another way to save time, perhaps counterintuitively, is to make meaningful and substantive edits in response to negative reader reports, rather than bounce your unchanged draft around a dwindling set of journals. A bad reviewer is your best friend as a writer; they’re telling you where your argument fails to convince. Embrace critique as a challenge to improve your writing, not an attack on your intellectual worth.

You asked for more cat pictures!

10. Treat yo’self.

Writing is hard. Do everything you can to make it easier. I love the advice to “park on a downhill slope”: before you leave your draft for the day, briefly outline the next paragraph so you have a running start when you resume. Forgive yourself if you have an unproductive day or week; we’re only human, and we all need fallow time to recharge. Plus, we’re all doing some serious processing, adjusting, and grieving right now. Do reward yourself after (and as) you write your daily allotment, no less heroic in your way than Vergil’s housewife bending humbly over her wool, and incentivize long labor with things you love. For me, before my present Madisonian captivity, this was travel; I’d hasten to meet deadlines before a flight, so I could relax and unwind on the journey. I’m still struggling to work out new reward structures now that every day feels basically the same. Maybe the joyous little riot in my yard every time I refill the birdfeeder (followed by the twitching of my writing assistant’s tail) will have to do now that the world’s contracted thus.

And the plea: make it count

Life is short. Whatever the shape of the curve, we’re all headed toward the same place in the end. The world needs more masks, more ventilators, but probably not more words. So if we do make time to write, let’s at least make sure we care. Let our scholarship sing why it matters from every page. The days when we could take interest in classics for granted are over, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When our cash-strapped institutions could invest in nurses and epidemiologists to battle urgent problems, why should they fund scholars of antiquity? Can this global crisis give our field the kick in the pants it needs to reach out beyond a few insiders to our quarantined families and students, our suffering globe, the hearts of our fellow exiles? That’s a question we’ll all have to answer in the days to come. And that, if I’ve ever heard one, is a reason to write.

Nandini Pandey finished her 14-day quarantine just in time to be declared “safer at home.”

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