THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 17
REFLECTIONS
EXISTENTIAL INCONVENIENCE
Life in the shadow of coronavirus.BY GEOFF DYER
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN REA
T
his might be the first installment of
a rewrite of “A Journal of the Plague
Year,” but it will be written in real time
rather than with the benefit of the fifty-
odd years of hindsight that Daniel Defoe
was able to draw on. If all goes well—or
very badly—it might also be the last in-
stallment, because although we’re only
at the beginning of the coronavirus out-
break, I’m close to the end of my tether.
Physical effects lie in the future, but the
psychic toll is already huge—and wide-
ranging. At the top end: Am I going to
catch it? This can be answered with a
slight rephrasing of Philip Larkin’s fa-
mous line from “Aubade”: most things
may never happen; this one probably
will. Strangely, that comes far down on
the list of worries. Dying, that most wor-
risome thing, occupies less head space
than the most minute things. Don’t sweat
the small stuff, runs the advice—and it’s
all small stuff. Except the small stuff—
so small it’s invisible—is the big stuff.
See? We’re getting in a right old tizz, so
let’s calm down and itemize our con-
cerns, concerns about the virus which
are also symptoms occasioned by it.
At the moment, the main concern is
inconvenience. When trains or planes
are delayed, the operators routinely “apol-
ogize for any inconvenience,” as though
inconvenience were just a minor thing,
as opposed to an “existential threat,” for
example. But inconvenience is only in-
convenient when it happens to other
people; when it happens to you, it feels
threatening. For most of us, our actualexperience of terrorism, even at its most
threatening, is of radical or habitual in-
convenience. At present, this means ask-
ing ourselves if we will be able to go to
X or Y and, if we go there, whether we
will be able to get back. I can actually an-
swer that quite easily. We’re not going.
We’re not going to Indian Wells for the
tennis, because it’s been cancelled, and
we’re not going to Mexico, because we’ve
cancelled, less owing to fears of catching
the bug than to our desire to put an end
to the are-we-or-aren’t-we? angst. It was
a huge weight off our minds when we
jumped ship (a plane, actually) so that
we could stay home and contemplate the
implications of existential inconvenience.
The good news is that, for many of
us, the virus might amount to noth-
ing more inconvenient than the flu. As
someone who hasn’t caught even a cold
in the past five years, the flu, until re-
cently, seemed a dreadful prospect, but
I’d settle for it in a heartbeat now. Book
an appointment, put it in the diary, get
it over with, and get over it! That’s ba-
sically what happened last year. After I
turned sixty, my doctor suggested that
I get the latest shingles vaccine. As an
Englishman living in America, I’m often
suspicious whether a new medical prod-
uct is a genuine breakthrough or just
the latest hustle from Big Pharma. So
I quizzed her about the side effects and
the price. Maybe a sore arm, she said,
and my health insurance would cover
the full cost. “Deal,” I said. “Let’s do
it!” As advertised, my arm hurt a bit
(couldn’t move it). I also went to bed
feeling slightly under the weather. The
next morning, I woke with a headache,
a fever, and muscle aches that lasted for
three days. It turns out that almost ev-
eryone I know who’s had this shot has
reacted the same way. And not only
that—you also need a follow-up shot
three months later, with similar results.
So I scheduled that for a quiet week
and, right on cue, went down with this
flu-ey thing again, for just two days this
time. It was both thoroughly unpleas-
ant—though a lot less unpleasant than
shingles—and really quite convenient.
A two-week helping of something like
that at the time of my choosing now
sounds very appealing—if it would con-
tent itself with being just the flu. I’ll be
sixty-two in June, and I’m enjoying the
perk of senior discounts while moving