36 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020advice as well: “It’s really, really tough
because you have to be honest with the
American public and you don’t want to
scare the hell out of them.” My son ac-
cepts the answer “I don’t know” a lot
more gracefully than I do.S
peaking of Shakespeare—he was the
minister who officiated marriages
of words that have endured to this day,
weirs of metaphor that we still use when
we go fishing for new truths, lines of
poetry that nearly all English speakers
repeat, as well as phrases so common
we have forgotten their origin:
That way madness lies.
Wild-goose chase.
Into thin air.
Lie low.
We have seen better days.
Today, we are witnessing the shot-
gun weddings of words into some
strange unions, neologisms sped into
existence by this virus (“quarantunes,”
“quarantini”), epidemiological vocabu-
lary hitched together by Twitter hashtags.
It seems like there is a parallel language
contagion occurring. “Self-isolation,”
“social distancing,” “abundance of cau-
tion”—pairs of words I’d never seen to-
gether in a sentence back in January
have become ubiquitous. These phrases
are travelling even faster than the virus,
eye to mind, ear to mouth, disseminated
by our iPhone screens and televisions.
“Community spread” may be my least
favorite on the Covid-19 vocabulary
list. It makes me picture a local theatre
company with terrible British accents
sneezing onto the audience. Nudists
rolling like seals on checkered picnic
blankets. “That’s a you problem,” my
husband says. Fair enough.
Language is everywhere these days,
and humans seem to have less and less
to do with it. Are there English ma-
jors chained under the earth, forced to
write these lines, or did an algorithm
of some kind generate them? The Mad
Libs of the press releases and public
statements ...
With an unholiness of fiscal re-
assurance.
With a cornucopia of dread.
With a punch bowl of amnesia.
With an oil barrel of greedy optimism.
With an I.V. drip of information.
With a loneliness of symptoms.
With a paucity of masks.With an embarrassment of #quar-
antine memes.
Of the language generalized by this
new virus, “flatten the curve” is the three-
word spell I find most useful. “Flatten
the curve” is a night-blooming locution
that seemed to appear in everyone’s
mental back yard at the same time. There
it was, right when we needed it, a phrase
to recast the stakes of the pandemic
after containment had failed and peo-
ple needed a way to understand both
the tsunami-like horror and the hope
prompting measures like statewide man-
dates to stay indoors. “Flatten the curve”
caused a paradigm shift for me; it taught
me, in three words, to stop thinking of
myself as a potential victim of Covid-19
and to start thinking of myself as a vec-
tor for contagion. It alchemizes fear
into action. The phrase is an injunc-
tion: it says, gently and urgently, that it
is not too late for us to change the shape
of this story.Q
uiet is disquieting on the streets
of downtown Austin. For two
hours, I drag my son behind me in his
black wagon. He is holding his “magic,”
a bamboo stick, singing a nonsense
song. I feel like we are staging a G-rated
remake of Cormac McCarthy’s “The
Road.” Maybe PG-13, since the public
bathroom was closed, and after an ac-
cident my son is now pantsless.
On a distant hill, a tiny silhouette
appears, gliding on air. A boy on a
scooter. My son begins waving franti-
cally, like a marooned sailor spotting
the rescue chopper. “Hey, kid!” But the
boy’s mother sees us and leads him in
the opposite direction. “No kids,” my
son says, bewildered and then resigned.
I sit between two large rocks, eating
sunshine with him. A lizard does push-
ups. Two sunburned white guys in their
sixties stroll by, chatting about the se-
crets they keep from their wives. “Hey,
nice to have a big guy with you at a time
like this,” one of them says, patting my
son on the back. I freeze, say nothing.
A mother and her four-year-old
daughter join us; we keep accidentally
closing the gap between our bodies and
apologizing. Our kids want to play chase.
No, we say. My son, who has an ex-
traordinary legal mind, suggests a loop-
hole: can they run next to each other?
“We won’t catch each other,” he prom-ises. The other mother coughs, and apol-
ogizes; almost balletically, we separate
the children. My son follows without a
peep of protest, a docility that fright-
ens me, as whatever my face is doing
seems to be frightening him.
A few months ago, in this same park,
I’d look skyward at this hour to clock
the moment when a great scattering of
starlings begins to wheel as one. Called
murmurations, these flocks gather in
the purple Texas dusk. Spiky iridescent
birds that stitch themselves into a sin-
gle animate cloud. (Starlings are an in-
vasive species; in 1890, a Shakespeare
enthusiast released sixty starlings into
Central Park, as part of a whimsical
mission to introduce to North Amer-
ica every bird ever mentioned in Shake-
speare’s works; today we have two hun-
dred million.) These enormous flocks
can execute sharp turns and vortical
spins with a magical-feeling coördina-
tion. A thousand starlings bunch into
a living fist over the trees, relax west-
ward, shear away behind the eastern
skyscrapers. With a kind of muscular
clairvoyance, each bird seems to antic-
ipate the movements of the others. What
is deciding them? What permits a thou-
sand autonomous actors to move as one
body, at these unbelievable speeds?
A recent study described how these
birds are able to “manage uncertainty
in consensus”: “Flocks of starlings ex-
hibit a remarkable ability to maintain
cohesion as a group in highly uncertain
environments and with limited, noisy
information.”
Rolling the stroller down the hill, I
wave to strangers on their porches. Wind
chimes cast their melancholy spell, as
the skyline turns into a pink Stone-
henge. Two boys are dribbling a bas-
ketball in the growing dark, their tiny
eyes peering out from a garage. Nobody
crosses the six-foot barrier; you might
argue that humans have never been less
like a flock than at this moment of vol-
untary isolation. But I also feel that our
stasis is itself a kind of secret flight. Ex-
ternally, we are all separating from pub-
lic spaces, cancelling weddings and grad-
uations, retreating into our homes. This
physical separation belies what is hap-
pening on another plane: people are re-
sponding to the crisis with a surprising
unity. More swiftly than I would have
thought possible, hundreds of millions