march30–april12, 2020 | newyork 13ars, plagues can make us see where we are.
money coming in, and marriages under the
acute stress of unending cohabitation. We
will retreat into our online worlds, where
viruses only affect computers, and withdraw
from our neighbors when we could do with
coming together. Online delivery will
replace restaurants; Amazon will continue
to displace local retail outlets; packages will
just be left on the doorstep, no human inter-
action required. Our society will disperse
inward, and the loneliness will be at times
intense. We are all already improvising ways
to manage, at least partially, as the dis-
patches in the following pages show.
During the aids epidemic, those of us in
the thick of it grew closer, caring for the sick
and each other, hugging, supporting, bond-
ing, or just showing up when we were
needed. Or we’d get together in groups to
remind ourselves we weren’t alone. This
time, that kind of physical solidarity and
comfort is impossible—because, with this
virus, we cannot touch each other without
risk of infection. It’s now been two weekssince I got a hug. And those weeks may
become months. What will we do to cheer
ourselves? How do we have sex without fear
of infection?
Good will happen too. Surely it will. The
silence in the streets portends something
new. The other day, I realized I’d been tex-
ting a lot less and calling a lot more.
I wanted to make sure my friends and fam-
ily were okay, and I needed to see their
faces and hear their voices to be reassured.
As we withdraw from each other in the
flesh, we may begin to appreciate better
what we had until so recently: friendship
and love made manifest by being together;
simple gifts like a shared joint, a head rest-
ing on your shoulder, a hand squeezed, a
toast raised. And in this sudden stop, we will
also hear the sounds of nature—as our eco-
nomic machine pauses for a moment and
the contest for status or fame or money is
canceled for just a while. “All of humanity’s
problems stem from man’s inability to sit
quietly in a room alone,” Pascal said. Well,we’ll be able to test that now, won’t we?
These weeks of confinement can be seen
al so, it seems to me, as weeks of a national
re treat, a chance to reset and rethink our
li ves, to ponder their fragility. I learned one
th ing in my 20s and 30s in the aids epi-
demic: Living in a plague is just an intensi-
fied way of living. It merely unveils the radi-
cal uncertainty of life that is already here
and puts it into far sharper focus. We will all
di e one day, and we will almost all get sick
at some point in our lives; none of this
makes sense on its own (especially the
dying part). The trick, as the great religions
te ach us, is counterintuitive: not to seize
co ntrol, but to gain some balance and even
serenity in absorbing what you can’t.
There may be moments in this great pub-
lic silence when we learn and relearn this
lesson. Because we will need to relearn it, as
I’m rediscovering in this surreal flashback to
a way of living I once knew. Plague living is
almost seasonal for humans. Like the
spring, which insists on arriving. ■