THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 23LETTER FROMLOSANGELES
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN REA
A
fter everything changed, suddenly
and unexpectedly, in New York on
September 11, 2001, evidence of catastro-
phe was there for everyone—for all the
world—to see. The damage was both a
horrible reminder of what had happened
and a portent of what might be still to
come. Today, even in some of the cities
most afflicted by the coronavirus pan-
demic, there is no physical devastation,
while death and illness, though wide-
spread, occur invisibly, behind closed
doors. Photographs in newspapers show
workers in hazmat suits disinfecting the
streets, but few of us have witnessed such
scenes for ourselves. The evidence of the
calamity is overwhelmingly of absence,
of empty streets and tourist spots. As
previously glimpsed in filmic depictions
of a post-apocalyptic world, aspects of
this scenario have an idyllic quality: streets
devoid of traffic and crowds.
In Southern California, with its gor-
geous sky and sea, the beaches have been
quieter than usual since the beachside
parking lots were closed, but people have
been allowed to jog or do yoga as long
as they maintain a suitable distance from
one another. And yet. Having topped up
their already top-of-the-range immune
systems with cold-pressed juices and
boosts, the same people who were ener-
getically maintaining the perfection of
their perfect bodies—bodies capable of
bench-pressing enormous weights and
running from Malibu to Santa Monica—
might suddenly, for no visible reason, find
themselves incapable even of breathing.(I spoke too soon; on March 27th, it was
announced that all beaches would be
closed through April 19th. So now the
beaches, too, are full only of absence.)
Shaped by a threat that is at once in-
visible and implacable, the necessary unity
and solidarity must lack all the excite-
ment traditionally associated with peo-
ple coming together in common cause
for events such as the March on Wash-
ington, in 1967, or Woodstock—or, going
farther back, the outbreak of the Amer-
ican Civil War, when one excited by-
stander observed, “The whole popula-
tion, men, women, and children, seem
to be in the streets.” This fusion of the
festive and the martial was beautifully
expressed by the poet Philip Larkin in
his famous description of the crowds of
men who, in 1914, lined up to enlist, “as
if it were all/ An August Bank Holiday
lark.” Despite invocations of the Blitz
spirit and the mobilization of wartime
rhetoric, there is not even an enemy
now—because the person most likely to
harm you will be your friend, neighbor,
lover, parent, or child. So there is none
of the collective fever of purpose and de-
termination—or, at least, that fever must
be experienced in isolation. Lovely things
like the applause for health-care work-
ers are attempts not only to make visi-
ble and audible our appreciation but also
to share our isolation. The times they are
a-changing, with stunning rapidity, but
Dylan’s rousing exhortation has now to
be completely reversed: Don’t gather
’round people ...
The required form of isolated soli-
darity is, weirdly, both in synch and at
odds with what, for the past decade or
so, has seemed an increasingly solipsis-
tic withdrawal, whereby, even as people
appear physically to be on the streets,
they’re psychically disappearing into their
phones. Now we’re on our phones at
home as a way of being on the street,
kicking ourselves for all those hours
wasted outside, looking at screens when
we could have been looking at one an-
other. As a collective act, we are encour-
aged to retreat deeper into the burrow
of phone-life to allow maximum free-
dom and minimum risk for those who
have actual physical and essential tasks
to perform. The best we can do is dis-
appear into the great indoors: an unprec-
edented inversion of everything that has
constituted solidarity, and one requiringHOME ALONE TOGETHER
Shared isolation is the new solidarity.BYGEOFF DYER