Isolation and togetherness
The desk where I write and daydream, gazing at the back garden
I had planned ahead a few blog posts, but now I find that thoughts about the corona virus pandemic crowd out all other thoughts.
As I move further into my memoir writing, I am exploring the lives of women in the past, my mother and grandmother. Deep down I often feel that our lives now are fundamentally different and even though I don’t admit it in so many words, better. I get the feeling that yes, it is interesting to think about past lives from the safety of our era, but secretly I harbor a sentiment very similar to safety, even relief that silencing, even oppression do not happen to me. It is the same feeling that I have following news on disasters: the Bam earthquake, the tsunami, the Ebola epidemic: how awful! I pitch in with a contribution to the appeals and spread the word so that others may be moved to do so too, but deep, deep down I am relieved that I am not affected by such events. I rationalize that they cannot happen in our part of the world.
I am sure I am not alone. We in the so-called developed world have got used to thinking that we are protected by a cocoon of immunity against uncertainty; we know that getting shopping done only requires the effort of popping down to the shops or clicking away at our laptop; safe drinking water is literally on tap; public transport is (largely) regular and reliable.
As the numbers of Covid-19 continue to soar worldwide and Britain enters an unprecedented phase, some certainties begin to feel wobbly. Facing empty supermarket shelves is something that none of us, except perhaps those who lived through war, have ever experienced. The certainty of being able to get anything online becomes a possibility, then a hope.
The first sense that something wasn’t right came just over three weeks ago with the shortage of antibacterial sanitizer gel. We thought, oh well, we will get through this with a bit of hand washing and gel, but normal life will carry on. In my family we cracked jokes about the shortage of hand sanitizer and teased each other, “I will trade you a pocket sanitizer gel for your headphones” and laughed it off. Barely three weeks later (or is it years later?), these are not jokes any more, as they are superseded by the everyday reality of toilet roll and hand washing liquid scarcity.
After 9/11 the American psyche was forever changed by the realization that terrorism was not something that only happened thousands of miles away in exotic lands…regrettable but not of immediate concern. 9/11 brought home the sickening realization that the cocoon of immunity had been ruptured.
But 9/11 was a man-made disaster that highlighted the division between “us” and “them”. The Covid-19 crisis is a division between “us” and “nature”: a tiny, invisible being has infiltrated our civilization, mocking our illusion of invincibility, making a joke of our arrogance. We are now at a critical junction in the history of humanity; we see moving examples of people looking out for the weakest, sharing scarce supplies, doing the shopping for aged neighbors. As we keep apart, we need to come closer together; may this unity be the silver lining long after the crisis is over.
© Sofia A Koutlaki 2020
