THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020 53
and other reflections in 2015. “Believe it
or not, I never quite got through Olm-
sted’s writings,” she admitted. “He was
a genius and a beautiful writer.” She is
now immersed in the volume: “I’m not
in the Park but I can stay in the Park.”
E
mptiness and absence contradict the
very concept of the city. The point
of a city is social proximity; to see peo-
ple deliberately spaced out, like the walk-
ing but never intersecting figures in a
Giacometti, is to see what cities aren’t.
In a historical sense, cities are always or-
ganisms of a kind, like coral reefs, where
a lot of people come together to barter
spices and exchange ideas and find mates,
and endure the recurrent damage of in-
fectious disease.
The question is whether the current
upheavals could somehow alter New
York forever. Some beloved places may
stay closed. Some new practices may be
perpetuated. The digital trends toward
disaggregation of experience may get a
boost, at a cost to everything we love
about the city. There’s an eerie gap be-
tween the raucous and argumentative
world of the Internet and the silence of
the streets. Outside, new patterns of
wider spacing and greater caution assert
themselves: Is that masked man conta-
gious and to be avoided by crossing the
street? Did we forget to sanitize after
touching the gate to the park? And, with
them, the terrible self-monitoring of
plague times: Do I feel normal? Is my
temperature high? Feel my forehead.
Until last week, no one ever thought
that Camus’s “The Plague” was about
the plague. It was the text through
which generations of high schoolers
were taught how not to read literally.
It was always taken as a fable or an al-
legory, specifically of the German oc-
cupation of France. The people in
Camus’s plague town of Oran did not
in any way deserve to suffer from the
disease, but the crisis revealed all the
various human responses of coward-
ice, denial, and courage. The point was
not that actual plagues tell us much,
but that the pressure of extreme and
unexpected events forces the flaws in
our common character to the surface.
This plague has proved an equal-
opportunity evil, striking theocratic
states like Iran and authoritarian ones
like China, and more open ones like our
own and those in Europe. Some hard
balance of authority and openness is ob-
viously essential to going on at all, but
this is not news. We have always known
that having the confidence to act, and
the clarity to see if the way we act is
good, is vital to our continued existence.
Our continued existence! It used to be
a kind of metaphor, really meaning “the
easy perpetuation of our familiar way
of life.” No more.
By midweek, even the dance of wari-
ness was muted: New Yorkers, largely
sheltering in place, still allowed them-
selves to walk their dogs, but walked
them alone on each street, with the
next dog and owner at least a stoplight
away. The dogs, puzzled not to have
the greetings of others of their animal
kind, sniffed doggedly in the dark,
though now only at the scent of their
solitary owners.
Tuesday, March 17th: Elizabeth Smith has been quarantined in her Upper East Side home since falling ill with COVID-19.
