It’s Day – what? Ten, Eleven, Twelve? And I’ve already lost count – of self-isolation. We have rolled in jam and feathers and are learning William Byrd’s back catalogue.
I seem unable to find an emotional middle ground between inanely thinking ‘For most of us this won’t be too bad and 95 per cent are likely to recover, focus on the positives’ and catastrophising: ‘Everyone who is over sixty, has a health problem or lives in a developing country is going to DIE and I’ll never see my parents again.’
Then I go outside and the weather is so beautiful, bright spring sunshine in a porcelain blue sky and cherry blossom and wallflowers, and to my astonishment my snakeshead fritillary is thriving, and I can’t believe any of this is really happening.
Yet another part of me seems to be observing events as if I am reading a dystopian novel or watching a film. This is the moment just before apocalypse strikes, right? And this is particularly odd because I almost never read those books (Station Eleven being a notable and brilliant exception) or watch those films, yet they have seeped into my consciousness anyway.
How helpful is this? Dystopian literature gives us markers, a little certainty on our way through this increasingly strange world. And we cling to certainty, we need a guide. But perhaps it also betrays our capacity to experience; it filters what’s happening to us through art so that it’s all second-hand. And are we the heroes, who will survive, or the masses, who will succumb?
Perhaps those narratives which feature heroes struggling alone in contrast to the masses are unhelpful narratives. For this is a crisis that requires us above all to think and act for the good of others, and to see ourselves as part of society, not as loners. Let us read Middlemarch and ignore The Day of the Triffids for now.
Hm, this was going to be a post about Frances Hardinge’s fiction, but I think now I’ll save that for another time. I wish all of you continued health, continued happiness.