THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 41PARIS, FRANCE, BY VINCENT MAHÉ SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, BY JISU CHOIyour feelings to make him understand (a
verbatim phrase from your seventh-
grade diary).
This is the mad dash of love in the
time of cholera, the exaggerated eccen-
tricities of isolation. One friend writes
in an e-mail that with his new leisure
at home he is exploring the blades of
his food processor and slicing every-
thing in sight. Another friend writes
that she meets in a neutral room of her
house once a day to have tea with her
daughter, who is home from college.
To provide a sense of variation and café
society, they use different tea sets and
meet in different neutral rooms.
The musicians who have Zoomed
their concerts and made amusing vid-
eos to cheer us up (shout-out to the tal-
ented Chris Mann!) show the human
spirit at its most resilient. People are in-
deed incredible. And music may be what
will keep us sane if misty-eyed in the
apocalypse. The more maddening world
where everyone seeks advantage over
someone else and pits his or her chil-
dren against the children of others will
ultimately have to bow down to a differ-
ent, more democratically uplifting one.
As the comedian Rob Schneider has
remarked, not even intending to be
funny, “I’ve seen people handle death
with more grace and more dignity than
people running out of toilet paper.” But
wickedness brought on by panic can be
swept away by other breezes. Even with-
out the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, I
sometimes think I hear them.
—Lorrie Moore
1
RIPPLEEFFECTSI
suspected that things might be get-
ting serious when, at a memorial for
an elderly friend, who’d died long be-
fore COVID-19 was a pandemic, many
of us tried to figure out how to greet
one another. The scenario might have
amused our friend, who’d died of nat-
ural causes, in the arms of his wife,
at the age of ninety-three. His memo-
rial was one of the last gatherings on
the main campus of Florida Interna-
tional University, which soon after-
ward moved to online learning. The
remarks on our friend’s life and work
were preceded by a public-service an-
nouncement reminding the sixty or soof us to wash our hands frequently,
cough into our elbows, and avoid close
physical contact.
“It will be hard not to touch,” we
said to one another. “We’re Haitians.”
In saying this, we were perhaps echo-
ing what so many other groups around
the world had said on similar occasions:
“We’re_______.” We did what we could
with elbow bumps, but there were oc-
casional lapses into tearful hugs and
kisses, until someone jokingly suggested
a butt bump, which a few of us tried,
with mutual consent. We were not yet
fully aware that there were people
around the world dying painful and
lonely deaths, some attached to venti-
lators, and far from the arms of their
loved ones.
Saying that we’re Haitians might also
have been an acknowledgment of our
past collisions with microbes. In the early
nineteen-eighties, the Centers for Dis-
ease Control named four groups at “high
risk” for acquired-immunodeficiency
syndrome: intravenous-drug users, ho-
mosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.
Haitians were the only ones solely iden-
tified by nationality, in part because of