THENEWYORKER,APRIL 13, 2020 43ecutive director of Americans for Im-
migrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm in
Miami, is also worried about how
COVID-19 will affect vulnerable immi-
grants, particularly those in detention.
“Misinformation, xenophobia and panic
have been running rampant in the wake
of this pandemic,” she wrote in a letter
to her organization’s supporters. “De-
tained children and adults in crowded
facilities have limited control over their
access to hygiene and adequate health
care. Many of our clients are immuno-
compromised. People who are detained
are packed in like sardines in these
places, which are petri dishes for the
virus,” she told me. “We have countries
that have now closed their borders and
are refusing to take deportees, which
means that people will simply languish
in detention and continually be vulner-
able to the virus.”
One thing that this virus has shown
is that, when anyplace in the world
sneezes, any one of us can catch a cold,
and a deadly one. I am still amazed at
how quickly everything has changed
since that memorial service, just a few
weeks ago. Our friend had lived a long
and beautiful life. He’d suffered some,
but he had also experienced a great
deal of joy. He had eaten a lot of salt,
as my cousin would say. Now I find
myself hoping that my neighbors, my
friends and family members, my chil-
dren, all of us will get to eat just a lit-
tle bit more salt, and not suffer too
much while doing it.
I remember telling a friend at the
memorial service how I was planning
to be in Chile this week, with my fam-
ily, to launch the Spanish edition of
one of my books and to visit some
members of the Haitian community
there. My oldest daughter would be
turning fifteen while we were in San-
tiago, and, because her birthday often
falls during spring break, she’s come
to see these purposely timed work trips
as special excursions for her. This week,
while we were observing Miami’s stay-
at-home order, I asked my daughter
what she wanted to do for her birth-
day, and she said that, just as we had
done a few times before, she wanted
to drive someplace pretty to see a beau-
tiful sunset. Maybe next year we will
be able to do that.
—Edwidge Danticat
1
HUMANISM,REMOTEI
skipped the Literary Arts departmen-
tal meeting of Monday, March 9th,
and I shouldn’t have. Item seven on our
agenda, “COVID-19,” suddenly became
item No. 1, and the upshot, as I soon
learned, was that we, the teachers of
creative writing at Brown University,
were now to begin the process of teach-
ing writing “remotely,” meaning, as
we all have come to know, via Zoom,
or Google Hangouts, or Canvas, or
Whereby, or Slack, or Padlet, or simi-
lar platforms.
How I felt about this suggestion of
“remote learning” was: what a mess. I
teach primarily undergraduates, and all
I could think about was the graduat-
ing seniors, and the hellish last semes-
ter they were going to have, panicky,
trapped at home, mitigated in their in-
dependence, likely to go without a grad-
uation ceremony, and stuck in a little
video postage stamp for hours a day.
They were enrolled at a great univer-
sity, but would not be able to make use
of it, not the libraries, not the common
rooms, not the rehearsal studios, not
the laboratories. And close behind this
initial feeling was anxiety about the
product itself, the online product that
I was about to be selling to the stu-
dents, a product that was hard to be-
lieve would not be inferior.
A frequently repeated theoretical po-
sition in my creative-writing classes is:
Literature is a humanist form. This idea
is not only so old-fashioned as to be
baldly quaint at Brown, like a beverage
in lead-lined pewter; it is also some-
times considered just plain wrong. Many
a student has cast a jaundiced eye upon
the very conception of humanism.
But humanism is exactly why, in my
view, a classroom with human bodies
in it, struggling over the meaning of a
short story, works. Because the literary
arts are not the same as the study of
economics or astrophysics. The literary
arts are about emotions and human
consciousness, and so the instruction
can’t be converted into data points. The
literary arts are more about a human in
the room feeling something, express-
ing it, and the other humans listening,
and, ideally, feeling similarly. Such is
the invention of compassion. Our in-struction is not only about dispensing
information; it is also about bearing
witness, grappling with the complexi-
ties of another.
But Zoom and its shortcomings
hurtled down upon the LitArts pro-
gram, like every other on College
Hill, and there was nothing left to do
but learn how to use this interface, to
try to cause the humanness to shine
through the ones and zeroes. I shared
the news with my students, bumped
elbows with them one last time. And
then they were gone.
I posted a call for Zoom help on
Facebook, where I learned about “shar-
ing your screen,” “breakout groups,” and
“asynchronous teaching,” for the kids
who are taking my course from Mum-
bai and Singapore, and who won’t re-
liably be able to stay up until two in
the morning for class. It turns out that
many of my friends have taught digi-
tally for years, in community and prison
workshops, through public libraries and
Y.M.C.A.s, and their students have be-
come stronger writers, have learned,
and grown.
Remote learning may be the only
feasible way to instruct in this lethal
time, but that doesn’t mean remote
learning represents the best idea in hu-
manist education, or that it is anything
like the long-standing model of the lib-
eral arts, a two-thousand-year-old idea
of teaching that may be the basis for
the university itself. What we are sell-
ing now is a hastily arranged experi-
ment. And it’s easy to grieve over that.
But what we cannot give up on, in our
grief, is the students themselves, at home,
panicking, and soon to be found in the
video postage stamp on Zoom or Slack
or Canvas or Hangouts. I know I can
still explain split infinitives to them, no
matter what. Now, if I can just figure
out how to call through the wireless
networking to their hearts.
—Rick Moody
1
EIGHTYISHO
ne measure of my simmering, so-
cially distant derangement is this:
after many days at home, I have dis-
covered how much I like to say the word
“Fauci.” I walk around my apartment
after the President’s press conferences,
chanting it like an efficient mantra, or