Home Aloneness

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

I was an English Major in college, which means a lot of money was wasted teaching me the nuances of Medieval symbolism in The Canterbury Tales, while at the same time making me utterly unemployable for the rest of my life. But I did become very good at correctly identifying literary quotes, such as the one above. It’s from As You Like It by William Shakespeare. Wait, no. It’s from Othello.

It’s also a perfect description of this particular moment in history. But as the Coronavirus spreads and its dangers loom larger, it seems like there is very little that qualifies these times as The Best, and much that qualifies them as The Worst.

Everyone I know, and everyone else I don’t know, is crouched inside and what is nostalgically called Normal Life has creaked to a halt. All over the world, streets are empty, stores are closed, people are separated, and there is a disturbing silence that used to be filled with yelling at basketball games, shrieking at concerts, laughing at comedy clubs, bellowing at governments, and friendly chattering, one neighbor to another. Everything with breath in it — — children with grandmothers, shopping at Target, getting books from the library, meetings in the Conference Room, the Health Club, and Stephen Colbert’s audience — — has been packed in boxes and stored above the garage.

This strange, formal loneliness is not just global. It’s annoyingly personal.

My universe is 5600 square feet of soap, disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer, plastic gloves and a mask which apparently doesn’t meet safety standards. My children and grandchildren are only images on a computer screen. I’m suspicious of grocery carts, packages on my front porch, door handles, and plastic bags from CVS. Beyond the walls of my house are dangers I don’t even know about yet.

I am trying to do all the right things. I’ve washed my hands so often I’ve scraped off the top two layers of skin. Yesterday I used Lysol wipes to sanitize 472 rubber bands. I’ve watched all 1,597 movies on Netflix. And despite opposing it for political reasons, I am aggressively searching for my own burka.

Slithering underneath all this frantic activity is a formless, persistent terror, an invisible menace on a determined path to my front door. I don’t see it coming and I can only sense its departure by the diseases it leaves behind. There are numbers that describe its size, which seem to be increasing, and geographies that identify where it’s been and where it’s going. I listen to incoherent advice on what to wear if it gets too close. But much of the information I get could be fairy tales, many of the facts are guesses, and most predictions are just mumbles in the dark.

There is a very precise science that explains this very imprecise villain. I’m a garbled mix of curious and masochistic, so I did some amateur research on the monster of biology common to all of us. What I learned isn’t cheery, but at least I know what we’re up against. And I’m very close to getting a PhD in Molecular Infrastructure.

It seems that the spasms of infection occurring globally can be traced to a small, useless packet of disorganized chemicals called the Coronavirus. The size of one virus is incomprehensibly tiny: there are about 10 to the 8th power for every cell in the human body. But despite being of insignificant stature, the sheer number of all the viruses that exist is so large, they are the most abundant biological entities on earth.

A single virus is not alive. It doesn’t contain cell structures or a nucleus. It can’t reproduce. It doesn’t convert food into energy. It’s not much to look at, either. All it contains are a few scraggles of genetic material covered by a layer of protein. It’s harmless, simple-minded, and boring.

But it’s not exactly dead. Like most men I have known, a virus doesn’t like to be alone and is obsessed with sex. If it comes into contact with a live organism, any organism — a flea, fungus, a bat, plants, bacteria, a squirrel, an amoeba, a person — it clutches on and begins an attachment bereft of tenderness or affection. In an act of relentless, compulsive violence, the virus pushes its few crumpled strands of DNA into a cell and immediately starts reproducing itself.

The organism that the virus invades is called the host. And the virus is a guest from hell. It becomes a rabid killer, replicating itself so quickly, the cell is overwhelmed and dies. The new viruses that have been created move on to kill other cells. This microscopic carnage continues until the organism is very sick or dies. Or until something stops it.

When viruses invade people, the human immune system discharges antibodies to squelch the attack. Healthy, effective antibodies kill the viruses and no infection occurs. But an immune system that is deficient in any way releases less vigorous antibodies. The viruses will still be destroyed, but not without consequences: a cold or flu develops. If the immune system is severely compromised, the antibodies are much less powerful, and the viruses move savagely forward. The person becomes dangerously sick. Fortunately, medical intervention can often reverse the damage and the patient recovers.

There is one other scenario, however, and that’s what’s occurring today. Like many viruses, the coronavirus is lightweight and can float on the air, traveling on coughs and sneezes. If droplets of it enter the body, they reproduce maniacally and can cause life-threatening infections. If they land on a surface that isn’t alive, they are thwarted and cannot move into action. But they can wait. The corona virus, with all its murder mechanisms, can survive for periods ranging from minutes to days. If human skin touches these surfaces, and the viruses are able to penetrate the body through the nose, mouth, or eyes, they will reproduce with mindless frenzy.

Whether this process becomes a global pandemic, a dangerous disease, a mild illness, or nothing at all, depends on an imperfect storm of circumstances that are now familiar. The age of the person, the condition of the immune system, the person’s general health, the coronavirus’s contagion methods, the degree of successful protections, and, most critical of all, the size and substance of public awareness and available medical treatments — these factors vary wildly and make the spread of the disease partly predictable and partly erratic.

Everything that is currently happening — isolation, uncertainty, economic instability, hospital shortages, social distancing, deaths, inept leadership, closed borders, panic, and individual hardships — began with one impotent scrap of biology that had neither intent nor impulse. The first corona virus did not have a political agenda. Or a profit motive. Or a personal grudge. It had nothing. It did nothing. It was nothing. Until it haphazardly seized some random life form and started chewing through its anatomy.

The coronavirus is relatively new, but it descended from viruses that existed billions of years ago, moving through time as companions to the forming universe, the galaxy, the solar system, and the frail blue planet upon which meaningless ocean creatures contorted and hobbled to become brain-rich humans who eventually turned around and looked back to study the invisible predators who had always been there.

It’s a pandemic, and this is The Worst of Times. From Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

These facts were a gloomy education for me, and I never should have gone to school. They convinced me that the earth is teetering on extinction and my own life was nearing the precipice as well. I was home in a safe place, doing familiar things, but I was paralyzed with convulsions of impending doom. I can’t live in a state of extended horror, no one can, and the only way I ever defeat the demons in my mind is by laughing at them. Monsters, imagined or real, want to be taken seriously. Making fun of them depletes their roaring and resolve.

Happily, the same online resources that formed my fear also contain deliriously funny comments. A lot of people have shared their irreverent amusement at our shared predicament. These are not people too stupid to recognize a real threat. They are people smart enough to know that a problem without an evident solution can be shriveled, even if not eliminated, with wit, good cheer, and brilliant hyperbole.

These are some of my favorites, and a few of my own:

One of the truly frightening aspects of being quarantined is that the Jehovah’s Witnesses know you’re home.

For the first time in history, we can save the entire human race by sitting on a couch watching TV.

Don’t forget: Rapunzel was confined to a tower for years but still managed to find a husband. So let’s be positive here

I think it’s fine that during this national crisis you are putting all your faith in God. Me, I’m counting on hand sanitizer and microwave popcorn.

Has anyone told the Amish what’s going on yet?

There has been talk about saving ventilators for young people because the elderly have already lived a long time. I’m 71, and my plan after the quarantine is to look for a couple of Millennials and shoot them between the eyes.

I’m homeschooling my kids, but if the quarantine lasts a long time, I’m in trouble. I can’t teach med school.

This was my first night of no sports on TV. I noticed a woman sitting on my couch. Apparently, she’s my wife and she seems nice. Also, when the TV is off, the screen is black.

It’s so odd. I never go out but I’m still late to everything.

Gratitude is working at a bank when two men in masks come in, but it turns out they’re only robbing the place.

I still don’t understand how a guy in China eating bat soup led to a toilet paper shortage in America.

I think laughing will make this The Best of Times, which is from Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark.”

I have a nervous, confused mind that contains melancholy, apathy, and bliss simultaneously. A professional might accurately describe it as bipolar. My less formal description is that I’m utterly fascinating because every human emotion scampers in crooked circles at warp speed inside the walls of my brain. When I look at a situation and say, “Well, I’m of two minds about that,” it’s literally true.

So I recognize that from early January of this year to 6:00 PM today, we are simultaneously experiencing The Best of Times and The Worst of Times (I looked it up. It’s from Jack Kerouac’s lesser known book, The Dharma Burns).

This is what I mean:

Girl Scouts in Garwood, New Jersey donated cookies and made cards for people taking care of Coronavirus patients at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Rahway.

After all NBA games were cancelled, Kevin Love, of the Cleveland Cavaliers, donated $100,000 to support the hourly employees of Rocket Mortgage Arena.

On March 11, defending his administration’s handling of the pandemic, Donald Trump said, “…we’re having to fix a problem that, 4 weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem.” In fact, medical experts and his own advisors started warning him in late 2019 that the Coronavirus was coming.

Bill and Melinda Gates donated $100,000,000 to fight the Coronavirus.

When bread was no longer available in grocery stores, Nana Teresa’s Bake Shop in Fernandina Beach, Florida, baked 150 loves of Artisan Bread and gave away one per family to local residents.

On March 6, Donald Trump bragged, “Anybody right now and yesterday that needs a test can get a test. They’re there. The tests are there. The tests are beautiful. Anyone who wants a test can get a test.” In fact, there weren’t enough tests when he said that, and there still weren’t enough six weeks later.

At 7 PM every night, residents of New York City clap for 2 minutes to honor the health care workers who are helping Coronavirus patients.

Loews announced that it had designated $ 80,000,000 in bonuses for its employees.

On February 24 Donald Trump stated that, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done. We’re going substantially down, not up. The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” In fact, it didn’t go down. By April 3 there were 245,442 cases in the US.

New Jersey Human Services donated $70,000,000 in extra benefits to the 205,000 residents who receive food assistance.

When all the museums in Chicago closed, the Shedd Aquarium let many of the penguins out of their enclosures to walk around the facility seeing other animals.

In his February 4 State of the Union Address, Donald Trump said that he was keeping the CDC well-funded and that the federal government was prepared to fight the Coronavirus. In fact, he had been cutting the CDC budget for 2 years, fired the entire staff of the Pandemic Response Team, had no plan to fight a pandemic, lied about the infection numbers, and had done nothing about the lack of medical supplies, insufficient tests, dangers to the public, or projections of widespread infections.

Members of Chabad in Westchester, New York, went house to house to help quarantined families celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim.

The parents of Jordanna Shillman, whose bat mitzvah was cancelled due to the Coronavirus, sent all the prepared food (150 boxes) to people quarantined in New York.

Last week, Brett Crozier, commander of a Navy aircraft carrier, announced that 93 of the 5,000 people aboard his ship tested positive for COVID-19, and expressed fear that many more would be infected due to living in close quarters. The White House was displeased with the attention he drew to the outbreak and ignored his pleas for several days. Then they relieved him of duty, without explanation.

Residents of a neighborhood in Mount Vernon, Maryland, just outside Baltimore, formed a Quarantine Response Team to take care of any neighbors in need.

James Taylor donated $1,000,000 to Massachusetts General Hospital to provide whatever was needed for infected patients there.

Several dozen US pastors insisted that the Coronavirus was not a threat for good Christians and refused to cancel services despite bans on crowds larger than 50. Rose Barks, head of a church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, insisted “Now, I want you to understand this…if I’m a Christian, if I’m living for God, if I’m doing the right things, why would God send a virus to kill me?”

Elementary school students at St. Anthony’s Home and School in Columbus, Nebraska, made Get Well cards for people who have been affected by the Coronavirus.

Bauer, a manufacturer of hockey equipment, shifted from making visors for helmets to visors for health care workers fighting the Coronavirus.

Donald Trump recently appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to a key role in his Coronavirus task force, a position for which Kushner has no qualifications, knowledge, experience, preparation, or talent. Referring to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plea for desperately needed ventilators in New York, Kushner said, “I’m doing my own projections and I’ve gotten smarter about this. New York doesn’t need those ventilators.”

A Brooklyn landlord who owns 18 apartment buildings in New York City, notified all his tenants that they didn’t have to pay rent in April.

Netflix set up a $100,000,000 Relief Fund for the thousands of workers laid off after all TV and movie production worldwide shut down.

It is both The Best of Times and The Worst of Times. Quote taken from the last chapter of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

When the curve of the Coronavirus pandemic flattens out and dips into acceptable numbers, it will be safe to come out of our houses. Our former lives might be much the same, or permanently altered. Either way, two things will be remembered:

There were people who behaved badly, who didn’t cooperate, who didn’t seem to understand, or didn’t care, that everyone on earth was in great peril. Consistent with an entire life lived in obscene self interest and moral emptiness, Donald Trump, the current President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, provided leadership that was careless, dishonest, uninformed, peevish, lazy, tyrannical, illogical, egocentric,

petulant, unethical, and lethal. He didn’t create the Coronavirus. But his negligence made it worse. He ignored the warnings. He lied about the dangers. He bickered with experts. He balked at providing services and supplies. He didn’t listen. He didn’t study. He didn’t move into action until it was too late. Not once did he have any comprehension whatsoever, or care even marginally, that the very people he vowed to serve on January 20, 2017, suffered more than necessary under his malicious indifference. What he cared about, exclusively and without shame, was gloating over his imagined heroics, taking the easy way out, safeguarding his delusional image of manliness, blaming everyone else for his horrible blunders, figuring out how to spin a national tragedy to his advantage, and playing golf. He was a catastrophe of inborn and ongoing incompetence.

And during the same international disaster, consistent with conduct of great splendor throughout human history, there were uncountable instances of people whose principles gave them power that wasn’t shallow, people who behaved with the highest inclinations of their nature, not the lowest urges of their ambitions. They took action that was generous, unselfish, compassionate, exhausting, logical, inventive, dangerous, timely, gracious, effective, heroic, and far beyond ordinary expectations. They were the people who aren’t paid nearly enough for their services, who rarely receive, but always deserve, the adulation that is given liberally to charlatans of cheap fame, people who offered their talents and their own safety for a greater good, who didn’t have to do anything but did everything, a miraculous throng who helped fight a growing disaster when their government failed to do so, and who rose as an entire nation of honorable hearts and voracious goodness to save the afflicted and reduce the effects of a pandemic. They have always been the quiet masses of the overlooked, the truck drivers, grocery clerks, nurses, janitors, firemen, mail deliverers, food servers, factory workers, law enforcement officers, vets, teachers, pharmacists, and farmers, as well as the invisible citizens of kindness who take meals to the elderly, sew masks for hospitals, clean tables at food kitchens, provide essentials for the unemployed, donate clothes to shelters, shop for the infirm, tutor students in their homes, and pray for the sick. They — — not the wealthy or the powerful whose hearts are stingy and souls are ugly — — they are the true aristocracy of the human race.

Eventually this disease will recede, and the days, weeks, and months of its terrible, unpredictable spread will be become a collective memory of the best of times and the worst of times. But mostly, because so many people gave so much, it will be the best of times. The very best.

From the1948 translation of Lysistrata by Aristophanes.