A year ago, after we were all abruptly sent home from school and placed in lockdown, I arrived back in my family’s home in California and tried to digest the unfolding situation. I felt afraid. When something shakes your certainty of the world and the rules by which it is governed, what else can you feel? I didn’t realize how much I depended on those unseen, unspoken, unrecognized tenets of my life until they were gone. I knew I loved my friends, I didn’t realize how much until we were separated; I didn’t realize how much I loved going places until I couldn’t go anywhere; I didn’t realize how much I loved seeing other people until I was isolated from everyone. And there are other, smaller things that we’ve all lost, too. Little joys that don’t exist anymore; sample trays in the grocery store; high fives; movie theaters; blowing out the candles on birthday cake. What seems to essentially be the threat of other people is too great for these things to exist in the same way, if they ever do exist again. I should say that this is really the very tip of the COVID iceberg, the luckiest, most fortunate tip. I didn’t have COVID, I still haven’t had COVID, and neither have any of my loved ones. Everyone I know is healthy and safe. Everything else is immaterial, right?
I thought so. I still sort of think so. At any rate, this is the attitude with which I approached the changing world. But we have all lost something– something huge! Our culture is not the same: it has been split from the seams. Everyday expectations have been upended. The world totally changed seemingly overnight, and we were all forced to adjust.
Reflecting on those first few months of lockdown is bizarre. I catch myself wondering why, when the world was put on pause, I didn’t do more. But, really, like pretty much everyone, I felt suddenly stuck and totally stagnant. It was hard to get out of bed in the mornings.
Mainly, I wonder why I didn’t read more. Normally the idea of uninterrupted, totally free time would be exciting to me, as a lifelong, avid reader. As a kid I would spend hours reading everyday– at home, at school, at soccer practices, at swim meets, at friend’s houses, and definitely under the covers at night. Reading had always been my “escape,” the thing I thought of as my superpower. But when the pandemic hit I just couldn’t read. I couldn’t start a new book, even though I had a stack of unread books waiting on my bedside table and plenty of time to read them. A week went by, two weeks, three. It was so odd, like I was grieving for something I couldn’t exactly put into words. I felt depressed, too. Worse was that I knew reading would probably save me from some of those feelings of sadness and despair… but those feelings were also the reason why I just couldn’t seem to start a new book. I was alive, I wasn’t sick, I was surviving this really scary and totally overwhelming global catastrophe, but I didn’t feel OK.
That’s when I started going through my childhood bookshelves. I found universal childhood classics that I’ve re-read many times since childhood– Harry Potter, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings. These are the types of books I’m always reading and re-reading. Then I found other books, ones I’d forgotten about like The Tale of Despereaux, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Redwall, The Magician’s Elephant, The Sisters Grimm, Inkheart, and Matilda. I had loved these books, and that feeling of love had impressed itself in my memory– even if I couldn’t quite remember their plots.
Earlier in the pandemic, I had sort of scanned an Ann Patchett article from the New York Times on the wonderful written world of children’s and middle-grade author Kate DiCamillo. About the assumption that DiCamillo’s work is only for young readers, Patchett wrote: “Don’t miss out. Do not make the mistake I nearly made and fail to read them because you are under the misconception that they are not for you. They are for you.”
I believed her. So I started re-reading all my favorite old books. In a period when everything was uncertain, the entire world unstable and scary, I still loved these books that had been so precious to me in childhood. That was my certainty, my stability. Have you ever loved something so much– a book, a movie, a TV show– that you wish you could experience it again for the first time? All I really remembered about most of these books was the fuzzy feeling in my chest that I associated with them– and I got to rediscover that feeling again and again.
This habit of re-reading my favorite children’s books led me back to reading in general. Eventually I got started on the stack on my bedside table. It got easier to get out of bed, to brush my teeth, and get dressed. I was grateful that I was spending time with my family, in the home I grew up in, that I was safe, that the people I loved were safe, and that we were together.
In one of my favorite books of all time, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven— unfortunately, not a children’s book!– the characters wander an America where more than 95% of the population has been wiped out by the “Georgian Flu” and all systems of government have collapsed into a lawless, sparse landscape. The main character travels as part of a caravan called “The Traveling Symphony”, made up of musicians, actors, artists of all kinds, who walk back and forth across the country performing Shakespeare and Beethoven to the settlements of people they encounter in an effort to preserve masterpieces of humanity even after the apocalypse. On the side of The Traveling Symphony’s caravan, they have written the words “survival is insufficient”– taken from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager (one of the caravan members is a huge Star Trek fan, collecting TV guides and other pieces of memorabilia he finds as he travels with the troupe). I’ve always loved the sentiment of that– “survival is insufficient.” What the characters have experienced is unimaginable, traumatic, and seemingly hopeless. Yet their humanity proves much, much stronger than mere survival, and they go on pursuing the things they love. Art never becomes meaningless, in fact, it becomes the source of meaning for these characters as everything else is wiped away; it keeps them human. But this is a quote from Star Trek! For a group of people who wander a desolate world performing the greatest of all of humanity’s artistic accomplishments, why is their motto (a motto that Emily St. John Mandel herself has called “the thesis statement of the entire novel”) so seemingly un-Shakespearean? Because one character’s earnest and pure childhood love for its origin keeps the entire group moored to their purpose of a meaningful existence, even in the face of great catastrophe.
