For at least a month, thousands of students will be more alone than they perhaps ever have. If they abide by social distancing, which is imperative in preventing deaths, they should not be hanging out with friends or going to the movies or getting boba. They will be staying safe in their houses, six feet apart. This isolation, as crucial as it is, can drive us mad.
Like all things, art has had something to say about that. In her unabridged diaries, Sylvia Plath writes, “I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart . . . I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look to the sky so I get to feel smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.”
For the past two weeks, Ithacan skies have been like one great patchwork rolling over hills and valleys endlessly, alternating between high blue clarity and muddied grey; grey swirls with inscrutable messages that demand to be peeled off and interpreted. Staring at them, prowling them, could drive someone insane. Just like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s nameless protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” who is locked in her room and driven to hysteria, we are nearly driven mad by our confinement, the stifling. We yearn to rub the grooves of our shoulders against the sky, just to break through the stratonimbus sheet of it. But for the good of the world, we must stay in our homes and lock away the world. Luckily, we are not alone. Writers from all centuries and schools of thought have felt isolation, for human nature is such that each experience is felt across every land a thousand times over.
A hundred years earlier, during the outbreak of the Spanish Flu, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, was quarantined in France. He wrote in a letter that “It was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star.” Despite the fact that flu outbreaks leap only across the web of humans—sparing the high crowns of trees, the belligerent chickadees, and the signs of coming spring—the weather always seems to reflect the mood of the world. Fitzgerald goes on to talk about how he met fellow author Ernest Hemingway, in which the former had punched the latter, and writing about how Fitzgerald had asked Hemingway whether he had washed his hands (Hemingway hadn’t). He ends with this line: “And yet, amongst the cracked cloudline of an evening’s cast, I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better morrow.”
That better morrow is not certain. Every day, we wake up to the radio spewing news that shakes us to our core. Poet Audre Lorde describes the feeling when she says, “And when the sun rises we are afraid / it might not remain / when the sun sets we are afraid / it might not rise in the morning.”
The irony of it all is that all of these lonely writers had dozens of others feeling the exact same thing. James Baldwin, novelist, essayist, and poet, sums it up when he says, “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.” So while we wait out the end of this epidemic, it might be worth reading something. Whether they are long-dead authors or living friends, hold their words as a comfort. They lived through dark times too.