Guilty Thoughts While on Lockdown

I have a confession to make: I really don't mind being on lockdown all that much.

I'm sure for some people it is maddening. For an introvert like me, however, no big deal. Sure, it would be nice not to worry about how many trips I make per week to the grocery store. Or not to wear a mask, as I have now taken to doing.

But let's face it, I more or less like reading books. When there is no pandemic, I spend my time reading and working. When there is a pandemic... I spend my time reading and working. I don't require a lot of social interaction, and although I like my neighbors, colleagues, fellow parishioners, etc, etc, I would be lying if I said that I deeply miss all that human contact.

But I feel a little guilty about feeling so complacent. For one thing, I'm not sure that this doesn't simply reveal a character defect of mine! But quite apart from that, I know that my ability to feel complacent rests in many ways upon my own good fortune. For instance:

I have a job that can be relatively easily moved online and done from home.
My family has been healthy.
I live in an isolated, rural area that has not been nearly as hard-hit by the virus as other places.
It would be nice to go someplace occasionally, but let's face it, there isn't really anyplace to go in Houghton even in the best of times!

I suspect I might feel differently if I were a front-line health care worker who had to show up everyday in mid-town Manhattan, where the usually bustling life around me had suddenly shut down.

Not that I have nothing to worry about, mind you. All of higher education is shaking in its shoes at the fear of what next fall could bring.

But for now, I just work and read books. It could be worse.

Comments

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf! I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink. Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ). This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor. But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic. Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing. (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting." I thought they were quite interesting. The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before. Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...

Alias, or Real Life

I mentioned yesterday that I'd managed to read several things over the past week. And believe it or not, not all of them were by Gotthelf! On Saturday I decided I should give myself a break and read something else for a change, so that morning I decided to finish off a book I'd been in the middle of for a while, Alias, oder Das wahre leben ( Alias, or Real Life ), by Felix Philipp Ingold . Ingold is a Swiss author, editor, translator, and journalist; there isn't much about him in English, and I don't think any of his books have been translated, but you can read a one-paragraph summary of him here . It was an interesting book, partly because of the premise. It purports to tell the life story of one Kirill Beregow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga Russian of German descent. The hook is that Beregow/Berger is a real person, an acquaintance of Ingold's, and the book is supposedly based upon conversations with him and papers that he left behind, fictionaliz...

Plague Time

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