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| Xaver Winterhalter: "The Decameron" (1837). Image from Wikimedia Commons. There are a lot of Decameron images... |
Amongst the books I've read while trapped at home* is Joshua Levine's The Secret History of the Blitz (not really all that secret, but hey, catchy title); there are some interesting parallels between what people went through in London in 1940-41 and what many of us are dealing with eighty years later. One big difference, though, is that during the Blitz some of the risks (and the fear) could be shared (sheltering in the Tube stations, strangers spontaneously helping one another out) whereas today we have to pretty much keep to ourselves.
Yes, we can all keep in touch with one another via Zoom or Discord or whatever Google is calling its conferencing system this week. But it turns out you can't get much more in the way of nuance from a video chat than you can from text messaging.
Also, it is not nearly as much fun buying books online as it is charging into the musty scent of an old bookstore whose stock threatens at every moment to avalanche down on you.
*It is supremely depressing to realize that if it were possible to play Risk Factor Bingo, I would be able to win the game outright. Accordingly I am not allowed out of the house except to drive Lorna to the market. Not a lot of difference between sitting by myself in the house and sitting by myself in the car, I'm afraid.
2 comments:
Nancy and I are lucky that we live in an area that is good for walking - the lake is a ten minute walk from our house - which gives us a pleasant destination as an incentive to get out. But we have been letting our son do some of the shopping, like Costco, and relying on online ordering for most the rest. We've been forced to make occasional trips into stores but try to reserve that for "seniors hours" where it isn't as crowded and we wear masks and gloves.
The main thing I miss is live music and the occasional movie. And my monthly friendly poker game.
If the pandemic keeps up, winter is going to be hard.
I refuse to even contemplate a winter of this. Oh, I'll put up with it if I have to (beats hell out of the alternatives), but I don't want to think about it until I absolutely have to. I'd pretty much stopped going out to movies and music well before the plague came down, but was surprised, once I couldn't do them anymore, about how many small excursions Lorna and I used to make. And now cannot.
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