Journal of a Plague Year: Life from the Center

Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene.... It is radiant. It takes no time, but it occupies all our time. Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

This time last year, I attended yoga class four to six times a week, as well as Quaker groups and meetings, and, as an experiment, immersed myself in the process of self-publishing a book. I had the same almost full-time work-at-home schedule I have now. My daughter was getting married, I was researching a scholarly paper on Virginia Woolf, and Roger and I were making frequent weekend trips, including one to New York City to look at wedding gowns with Sophie and Ben (and have dinner with relatives and see museums).

While in New York, we took advantage of the time to see a show at the Guggenheim given over to Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), whose abstract works predate Kandinsky and certainly the 1960s pop-art they anticipate. Above is one her traditional painting, done early in her career. Below is a later painting, done after she started believing she was being given visions. Now, unable to museum tour, we watched a wonderful 2019 documentary on Klimt: Beyond the Visible. 

The Klimt film Beyond the Visible argues that art history needs to be rewritten to give credit to this reclusive figure. She did, however, give a show in London at the Friends Meeting House, which Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury artists must have been aware of (Fry was raised a Quaker and, and as we all know, brought modern art to England.) Klimt had wanted her works displayed in a spiral building like the Guggenheim--and she, Kandinsky, and Wright were all disciples of theosophy. 

There was a measles outbreak near the airbnb where we were staying in Brooklyn, and I remember wondering how this crowded area would fare in an epidemic. Thinking about the measles had led me to start rereading Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year, a project that I now look back on as naive.  I had no expectation at all that a year later I would be in the midst of a worldwide pandemic--this despite many warnings that such a thing could happen.

In retrospect, it seems ironic I was rereading Defoe's fictionalized account of the London plague of 1666, A Journal of the Plague Year,  a year before our own pandemic.  Now I am glad I did. 

This time last year we attended Nick's graduation from Allegheny College, where he won the "spirit of philosophy" award. We had a celebratory dinner in Pittsburgh. Will joined us for the weekend. We ate out at least once weekly, made visits to Roger's mother in a nursing home, and visited Will in Richmond, Indiana as I researched Virginia Woolf's Quaker aunt, Caroline Stephen, another Woolfian project. It was a period, because of a crowd of events, in which I was spending every other weekend out of town.  At home,  I seemed to have constant errands, plus hair appointments and the occasional lunch with a friend.  And yet, I would have protested I led a quiet life. Now that life looks enormously packed.

It is a year later. I look out my window. The long grass tips in the meadow quiver in the breeze. We have had so much rain that everything is brilliantly green, as if this is Ireland. Small leaves appear on the oak tree. The water on the lake ripples and sparkles. The barn, repainted red twelve years ago, is beginning to peel: I do lead a quiet life in the country. 

I have lost track of what week it is of our extended "shelter in place."  Roger now works from home. Nick is an essential worker as he stocks shelves at night in Kroger, an interim job to land him on his feet after college. He gets a "hero's bonus" of an extra $2 an hour for one more week. We go for groceries every other week. Sometimes, I have run other errands. We adjust to wearing masks in public.

The world has slowed. My lungs seem to expand and take in air as I think of the earth getting a breath, a chance to heal. This is a time when blue skies dawn over quiet cities. That seems a huge gift. We are not now ceaselessly overworking the planet which gives us the possibility of life.

Our lake, May of last year. Whatever I write, always a part of the story is left out. I am appreciating this extraordinary gift of retreat and quietude but there are times I long to see people. 

When the weather permits Roger and I take walks. Sometimes I walk alone around our acre of yard.  However, not having been brought up in the way of the British to slog through bouts of seemingly incessant rain, I stay indoors when the weather is bad. As I do, I think of Virginia's Woolf's habit, formed early, of daily walking, rain or shine. Yesterday, mid-May, we woke to frost and snow on our cars. It was warmer in Chawton, England, Jane Austen's home, than Ohio.

Today, weather permitted, so Roger and I took a walk. He knew where the gate was to get us into the pasture nearby. We walked there, seeing an idyllic brook with two small waterfalls.  I am appreciating the slower, healing rhythms of this simpler life.

Sometimes in years past, when I was trying to calm my racing brain, I would look at old photos on the internet from the 1940s of women washing the marble steps of row houses in my birth town of Baltimore.  Who would have time for that anymore, I would wonder. But now we have that time back. Activities a year ago squeezed to flatness and crowded out by business now expand and take up space.

Our basement is cleaner. We sorted out Roger's closet. We cook frequently: I have tried new recipes, made Indian red beans, homemade salad dressing, waffle batter. Roger cooks and makes frozen margaritas and lemon drop martinis at home. Not eating out has not been the hardship I imagined, though I do miss it as a seemingly lost way of life. My reading continues at a steady pace but feels far less harried.

It seems ironic, too, to be reading this year about travel and movement when we are "sheltering in place."

During this pandemic, I feel for lost lives and lost jobs. It can seem frivolous to write about a life that has so far existed in a bubble untouched in many ways by what is going on.

Life now has some of the feeling of Groundhog Day, a repetition of the same day rather than endless variety or the illusion thereof.  Life therefore develops a new rhythm. There is time. The world is no longer too much with us. I hadn't realized before how much pressure I was putting on myself to keep my time "filled." Why does time have to be "filled" in a rush of activity? Why not allow white space? Why not let what is there already in time and place expand?

Something in our hearts-- my heart--has longed for this quiet life of contemplation. And now, miraculously, we live Yeats' dreamscape of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree:"

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

In our bubble, our waiting stasis, there is a sense of uncertainty. What will happen next? What will the future hold?  I remind myself that there's always been this uncertainty, usually, of course, hidden under the illusion of "normalcy," the illusion people so often hold that what is now will always be, immutably. If we don't know what the future holds, we didn't six months ago either.