Quarantine has made me a lonelier woman, but I’ve always held the inheritance of another woman’s loneliness. When my mother was in her early twenties, she left her mother’s house in Bangalore to move to New York City, where her new husband—my father— had been living for the previous few years. It was her mother, my grandmother, who arranged the match. My grandmother was thrilled to send my mother to America, even though my mother didn’t want to marry and didn’t idealize coming to America the way her mother did.

You can be happy anywhere, unhappy anywhere, my grandmother told her. The two of them had a mother-daughter relationship like something out of a Jamaica Kincaid novel: loving but contentious, fraught with discipline and warnings about the difficulty of being a woman.

My mother remembers her early life in New York as a kind of self-quarantine. While my father worked, she spent her days isolated in their tiny studio apartment, going stir-crazy, cooking and cleaning and staring at the clinical white walls. A gossipy relative back home had spooked her into believing she’d be assassinated if she opened the front door in America. Occasionally, she spoke to the women holed up in the neighboring apartments. But most of her downtime, my mother spent sleeping. She slept purposefully and often, trying to reenter her old life in her dreams: the long walks with college girlfriends to the pani puri truck, the yipping of a neighbor’s Pomeranian, the pulse of life as an unmarried woman, alive with vagary and freedom. My mother resented her mother for marrying her off. They spoke once a month, on an international call, during which they’d argue about fate. And then my mother would hang up, miss her mother, and sleep away some more of her time.

Experiences like my mother’s are commonplace for many women. They’re often fictionalized and folded into novels about immigrant experiences, novels many readers from immigrant communities have grown tired of. Can’t we tell stories other than the one about coming to America and assimilating? And yet, those narratives have a pull for me—they contain the stories about women’s loneliness that have always absorbed me.

I’ve read Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy over and over. It’s the novel I turn to when I crave the order of a book I have loved before. First published in 1990, Lucy is about a young woman who leaves her home in the West Indies to work as an au pair for Mariah and Lewis, a well-to-do white couple in the United States. At first glance, Lucy seemed to me like the kind of novel I am built to love: I had always wanted to be a woman rising, and so I liked stories about women rising. Lucy’s premise suggests a narrative about social ascendance—a young, wage-earning woman, a modern governess type who pulls herself up by her bootstraps. It seems, on the surface, to promise to be another immigrant bildungsroman, charting the arc of a young woman’s maturation into a society where things like bootstraps are celebrated.

But Lucy doesn’t care about ascendance or assimilation. Kincaid doesn’t concern herself with a woman becoming, but rather with a woman being. How does a person get to be that way? Lucy wonders, over and over again. What she wants to be—all she wants to be—is alone. She wants to isolate herself before society seizes the chance to isolate her. Solitude is an act of self-preservation, whereas loneliness can be an act of violence, and so every choice Lucy makes is in pursuit of solitude. She chooses to leave her island behind. She chooses to leave her mother behind, a mother who, for all the ferocity of her love, raised her daughter with the same patriarchal hand that had raised her.

Once in the States, Lucy ignores the stack of letters her mother sends her, all the notes of love and punishment and longing. She comes to love her employer, Mariah, like a mother figure, and the two form a bond despite the chasm of their class difference. “The right thing always happens to her,” Lucy says of Mariah. “The thing she always wants to happen, happens.” After Mariah’s marriage breaks apart, Lucy stands by her. But the gap between them widens, and eventually Lucy saves up enough funds to leave her proxy mother, too. With the money she’s made as an au pair, Lucy and a friend move into an apartment together and split the rent. There, her solitude found at last, she finally writes back to her mother. She intentionally signs off with the wrong return address, severing their correspondence forever. But even in her apartment, with its tiny rooms and its barred bathroom window, Lucy isn’t free of her mother. Her mother’s voice lives inside her—it’s Lucy’s voice, too. Lucy is made up of two women: herself and her mother. “I was not like my mother,” she says, “I was my mother.” No one who contains multitudes is ever quite alone.

As I sit, alone, through quarantine, it’s my fourth time rereading Lucy, but I still remember my first. I was in college, and my professor introduced each novel we studied with a chalkboard quote culled from another novel. For Lucy, that quote came from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eliot writes, and I have never forgotten:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow, and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we would die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. 

The quote arrives at a point in Middlemarch when the heroine has just married. She’s crying on her honeymoon. Her new husband, of whom she wanted to be an equal, has relegated her to the position of an assistant. The heroine’s pain is visceral—the claustrophobic friction of a marriage, the realization that a man is what he always was—but it’s also ordinary, and Eliot’s shrewd narrator knows that readers don’t sympathize with ordinary pains. To sympathize with the ordinary would be impractical; it would mean feeling too much.

In solitude, Lucy sees the world with that keen vision and feeling. The ordinary moves her; she sees it down to a depth that others don’t. Some of those depths are painful: I think of a moment when Mariah asks Lucy if she’s seen daffodils before. To Mariah, the flowers are just pretty spring flowers. But Lucy can’t appreciate them. To her, daffodils mean growing up on an island that was also a colony. They mean the time at Queen Victoria’s Girls School, when she was made to memorize an old British poem celebrating daffodils. They mean being made to recite that poem aloud, the sound of imperialism ringing out from her own mouth.

And then some of those ordinary depths are beautiful: on a trip to the lake with Mariah and Lewis, before the family parts, Lucy meets a boy who piques her interest. They talk and later hide away behind a hedge of wild roses. The boy is ordinary and kisses Lucy all over with his “ordinary mouth.” Still, Lucy enjoys their intimacy more than with any man before him. His kisses aren’t just kisses, but metrics of how much Lucy misses home, of how long it’s been since she’s been touched and kissed.

“I was not happy,” Lucy admits at the end of the novel, in the solitude of her bedroom, having successfully left behind all the women and men she loved. “But that seemed too much to ask for.”

These past few months, I’ve done the journey so many of these women have in reverse. I’ve left my life in New York City and returned to my mother’s house. It’s the same house in which I grew up, an hour south of the city, where my mother and father moved after packing up their studio in Queens, one daughter then little, one daughter on the way. I spend my days sleeping away the hours in my childhood bedroom or going stir-crazy to the sounds of the squirrel’s heartbeat and the grass growing, the washer thrumming and the slow thuds of the boxes that pile up outside our front door. Sometimes I hear the sound of a woman grieving under my sheets. And then my mother knocks. “Why are you crying?” she demands. And I want to tell her that I’m unhappy, but that seems too much to ask for. Instead I ask her, as she turns to leave—Aren’t you lonely? And she just shrugs, an expert where I’m only an amateur. “I was lonely like this before,” she says. “Only difference now is that the world is lonely with me.”

Our flat in London has five windows and two skylights. Like most renters in this city, we have no yard, no balcony, no fire escape. Four floors up from the street, the windows offer our allotment of open space; the sky forms our personal outdoors. Over the past weeks, since our early self-quarantine bled into the UK’s nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, I have studied the way patches of light move through this flat like I’m a geographer of warmth. I follow it in arches as the hours pass, as though I’m a dot floating across a time-lapse heat map. Cooped up in a few hundred square feet, I have learned that my sanity depends on putting myself in that path of light, again and again and again.

It begins in our bedroom, which faces southeast: early in the morning, a rectangle of light hits the wall at the foot of our bed, bisected by the windowpane’s even cross. At midday the skylight creates a square foot of heat in the hallway; the dog and I sit there, sharing it. By early afternoon the sun has moved to the other side of the flat; a corner of the dining table is flooded with light, illuminating every pock and scratch in the wood. If I sit there until evening, the sun leaves my cheeks pink.

I’m light-chasing in my mind, too: trying to hop from one safe, warm spot of focus (the potted mint thriving in the window; the thin-sliced meat dry-curing in the oven; the dog nuzzled against my side) to the next (an untouched tray of watercolor paints; a fresh set of mismatched sheets on the bed; a bath at midday). The shadows of dread spread beneath my conscious thoughts. I look away as long-laid plans crack and rot. Fear has become ambient, the way you stop hearing the speeding train’s rattle when you live next door to the tracks.

Like all those who have built lives in a country that is not their own, where one’s right to exist is granted only in brief, expensive, and uncertain installments, I found myself caught between risks: the risk of staying in London and the risk of returning to America, the risk of distance and the risk of infection, the risk of being within and the risk of being without. Time made the decision for me.

There go the shadows! Gosh are they dark. I leap back into the silly, easy light: the neighbor’s blossoming jasmine, the dog’s wet nose, the warm breeze at night. There is birdsong in the neighborhood, was that there before? If I fill my mind with only this, I may get through. I know it’s a privilege to even try.

Books, I’ve tried, too. I page through new books and old books and books I’ve read before, desperate to be swallowed up. But it’s as though my brain’s been rewired: linear plots appear naive and presumptive; realist dialogue rings flat like a bad pilot script; and depictions of normalcy shoot my thoughts down a rabbit hole of when-will-it-be-that-way-again. I try and fail to lose myself, but then the book gets set down, and I somehow wind up on eBay, channeling homesickness into bids for Chicago kitsch.

I was aimlessly watching the ticker go down on an auction for Cubs paraphernalia when I saw the fat spine of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy staring me down from the shelf. I’d read the books years ago, as an undergraduate in California, a time in my life characterized by so much ease and beauty that I find it hard to believe it actually happened. Back then I’d admired the rhythm of his sentences and the ambition of his project, but had found myself listless in the face of his determined experimentation: the novels, The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and Big Money (1936), shuttle between snapshot narratives of various fictional American men and women; brief biographies of famous men; snippets of poetry and popular music from the radio; stream-of-consciousness autofiction; and headlines and sentence-length clippings from the Chicago Tribune and the New York World News. It’s a clattering 1,184-page portrait of a nation in perpetual crisis, reckoning with war, precarity, economic upheaval, cavernous political divisions, capitalism’s parasitic expansion, and the thwarted rise of American social democracy. To say that it’s a trilogy of “renewed relevance” would be to suggest the story of America has ever been otherwise.

Its massive size, which once filled me with a sense of studious obligation, now grants me freedom to roam. I read diligently for a few pages; I page ahead, flip back. I read like I’m improvising the act of reading. I stare at the headlines: “EMPLOYER MUST PROVE WORKER IS ESSENTIAL”, “THIS IS THE CENTURY WHERE BRAINS AND BILLIONS ARE TO RULE”, “STRIKING WAITERS ASK AID OF WOMEN”, “CONFESSED ANARCHISTS ON BENDED KNEES KISS U.S. FLAG”. My mind flits across the tales of Janey and Mac and Eleanor and Richard; I glimpse the lives of journalists and mechanics and actresses and activists. Dos Passos’s Modernism mimics the pattern of attention we’ve developed on the internet: headlines declaring personal or national disaster are interspersed with enjoyably vapid snaps of popular culture and the tales of individual lives. It’s impossible to linger on any given moment; it’s gone as it begins. I read Dos Passos before I go to sleep, I read Dos Passos when I wake up, I read Dos Passos while I follow the sun. I absorb maybe a third of what I read; the other two thirds just keep me company, run-on sentences filling my mind, keeping other thoughts out.

In truth, what is portrayed is a glimpse of what’s likely to come: wholesale unemployment, the vicious reassertion of capitalist power, rare moments of mercy spread far across a long line of economic devastation. Yet these snapshots of two cities I love—Chicago, New York—bring me comfort at a moment when I have no idea when I’ll see them next. The characters’ vagabond lives throw my own stasis into clear relief: their lives are uncertain, premised on promises the market never intended to keep, but there is an irrepressible momentum to each story, months and years passing in pages, characters ricocheting across the country in search of some kind of progress, rarely finding it but pushing forward all the same, each motivated by their own private fiction of America.

I’ve never really known an America like that, except through the stories my immigrant grandmother told me: the way, as a child, she would watch planes pass over the Philippines and imagine that every single one of them was headed to the States. Her single-minded certainty that one day she’d put herself on one of those planes; her dogged belief that when she got to America, her life would really begin. I’m now the third generation to learn that to call two countries home is to live in a perpetual state of flight: you have always just left, you have always only just arrived.

That immigrant restlessness is borne out in the expansiveness of Dos Passos’s project, his insistence that meaning would be found not in one person’s life but in a whole wave of voices, a ceaseless coming and going. The U.S.A. trilogy offers the comforting cacophony of the collective at a time of isolation. I know America will be changed when I next return (when will that be?) and I envy those who have the luxury of taking it for granted, who sigh that they wish they were in Europe, that they wish they were anywhere else. I understand where it comes from, but all I can think of is home. So I read Dos Passos and I let the days pass and the news cycles keep cycling through, rendering home for me in statistics and headlines and photographs of empty streets.

Dos Passos ends his trilogy with an unnamed young man on a plane headed west, looking out at the sky over the country as the plane passes through dusk: Cleveland, Chicago, Cheyenne, Salt Lake.

The transcontinental passenger thinks contracts, profits, vacationtrips, mighty continent between Atlantic and Pacific, power, wires humming dollars, cities jammed, hills empty, the indiantrail leading into the wagonroad, the macadamed pike, the concrete skyway; trains, planes: history the billiondollar speedup…

A hundred miles down the road.

In a corner of our apartment where the light never hits, we have a photograph by Berenice Abbott, one of Dos Passos’s Modernist contemporaries. The image depicts Exchange Place in Lower Manhattan, after the Wall Street Crash. Abbott’s vantage point is surreal, as though she’s on a tightrope between two skyscrapers, looking down on the street. Men in professional dress walk the streets, unidentifiable; a few look up, most keep their heads down. New Street and Broad Street form stripes of sunlight between the shadows of the skyscrapers. And at the end of the road, there’s a slight curve, where Exchange becomes Hanover, and a building at the edge of Abbott’s sight fades into the polluted, dusty light, like the part of a dream where your mind hasn’t thought far enough, a corner your subconscious didn’t get a chance to build. Of course, for those on the ground, the disappearing point isn’t there at all: just more road ahead, more shadows, more light to chase.

Head swims, belly tightens, wants crawl over his skin like ants: went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your home, shine bigger than your neighbor … paychecks were for hands willing to work … waits with swimming head, needs knot the belly, idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic.

A hundred miles down the road.

 

Jennifer Schaffer is an American writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere in print and online. 

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it. COVID-19 has prevented the indolence melancholy requires, even as its variants—anxiety, panic, vertigo—have bloomed in quarantine. If one is not already longing for melancholy, surely one has begun longing for the conditions in which it was once possible.

Perhaps this is why I’ve finally chosen to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy after many years of owning it. (I’ve not yet finished it; I’m not sure to what extent anyone can be said to have finished such a book.) “If you will describe melancholy,” Burton writes, “describe a phantasticall conceipt, a corrupt imagination, vaine thoughts and different, which who can doe?” The book sets this pessimism spinning like a top, whirling delightedly over local resentments and cosmic griefs alike. It is a labyrinth of arcane scholarship, obscure quotation, medical ephemera, and earthy shrewdness, all of it tied up with determining the root causes of melancholy. It is not hyperbole to call it one of the primary documents of European culture.

This greatest of medical treatises was written not by a doctor but a reclusive Oxford clergyman. As with Shakespeare, little is known about Burton outside his chief occupation. His contemporary, Anthony Wood, called him “an exact Mathematician, a curious calculator of Nativities, a general read Scholar, a thro’-pac’d Philologist.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is presented as a frayed patchwork of texts, is the obvious work of a bibliophile, less original conception than inspired collage. (“Tis all mine, and none mine,” Burton wrote. “Only the method is myne owne.”) It proved a remarkable popular success, going through six printings in Burton’s lifetime. After falling out of print for over a century, it was rediscovered by the Romantic poets—John Keats called it his favorite book—and quickly enshrined as a classic: the tract resurrected as literature.

William Gass has written of the book’s “terminological greed,” a phrase that goes some way in preparing the reader for The Anatomy’s extraordinary surfeit. Burton the anatomist reaches us as a thoroughly modern figure, a gathering of vibrant and contradictory energies. He is a model of inconsistency, equally at home in sense and nonsense, science and superstition, asceticism and sensuality. He apologizes for the length of his digressions only to plunge into yet more. The resultant overgrowth of text is a sort of radiant miscellany; an accumulation of conjecture, proof, rumor, and heresy; endless lists of proper names, foods, herbs, symptoms, profligate et ceteras, disputations, and lengthy essays within essays. Though not itself a novel, Burton’s fabulous act of literary excess prefigures the encyclopedic postwar fictions of the twentieth century—Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, Underworld—in which poetics and technics came together to approximate the informational density of culture.

It is perhaps the least quotable of great books. One no sooner extracts a sentence than one realizes it was load bearing; the whole structure seems suddenly liable to fall. It is best delivered in great slabs of rueful wisdom, its sermon-like weight leavened by mockery and irascible charm. Consider this, from “Causes of Melancholy from the Whole Body”:

No go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayest be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, etc.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou has in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art.

Or the beginning of the wonderful “Digression of Air,” which Holbrook Jackson has called “the first essay on climatology”:

As a long-winged hawk, when he is first whistled off the fist mounts aloft, and for his leisure fetcheth many a circuit in the air, still soaring higher and higher till he be come to his full pitch, and in the and when the game is sprung, comes down again, and stoops upon a sudden: so will I, having now come at last into these ample fields of air, wherein a I may freely expatiate and exercise myself for my recreation, awhile rove, wander round about the world mount aloft to those ethereal orbs and celestial spheres, and so descend to my former elements again.

Burton’s prose is not prettified. He is no phrasemaker. The joy of reading him comes from the conversational warmth his sentences kindle, the strong sense of a voice talking. It’s a gentle, provisional voice, never remote or pedantic, eager to remain at our elbow. It is the voice of a fellow traveler, familiar with the ailments he describes, having envied, desired, eaten too much, read too many books, sunk into depressions, and felt the marbles rolling dangerously.

Burton’s great intuition is that melancholy is the fundament of human nature—indeed, is itself human nature—a universal condition in whose shared suffering we might find both consolation and a case for more equitable relations:

And who is not a Foole, who is free from Melancholy? Who is not touched more or lesse in habit or disposition? … And who is not sick, or ill-disposed, in whom doth not passion, anger, envie, discontent, fear & sorrow raigne? Who labours not of this disease?

Only a laughing pessimist, a skeptic believer like Robert Burton, could have built to code the creaky, towering, impossibly angled edifice of human consciousness. This grand work of melancholy is also a comedy—not of manners but of minds—a celebration of everything addled, besieged, haunted, or endangered within us. One laughs and moans while reading it, in the dread and delight of recognition, the sounds at last too difficult to tell apart.

Dustin Illingworth is a writer in Southern California.

Maybe it is true that books find you when you need them: The Book of Disquiet sat on my shelf for at least a year before I took it down, sometime in February. The hardcover is fat and dense, and the text is, like a drug, rather mood-altering, so I was still working my way through it as things began to change, and am still working through it now, in a world that has come to feel entirely different.

The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, is properly speaking perhaps not a book at all, and I imagine Pessoa would not necessarily be pleased to have his name so prominently affixed to it. Under the orthonym “Fernando Pessoa” he did write an introduction, but he credited the texts themselves to two different authors, his semi-heteronyms “Vicente Guedes” (who “endured his empty life with masterly indifference”) and “Bernardo Soares,” an assistant bookkeeper. The book is made up of fragments of varying length, something like disconnected diary entries. They have been ordered in different ways since they were first collected in 1982, nearly fifty years after Pessoa’s death; in 2017, the Half-Pint Press in London did an edition “typeset by hand and printed by hand on a selection of various ephemera, and housed unbound in a hand-printed box.”

Maybe Pessoa had a plan in mind for his fragments, maybe there was a structure that we just can’t divine—the version I have, Margaret Jull Costa’s 2017 translation of Jerónimo Pizarro’s 2013 edition, is, I think, the first in English to present them as close to chronologically as scholars can figure out—but if any hypothetical order exists I’d rather not know: these are scattered times. Things one didn’t even know one held to or depended on are gone. Rhythm, habit, the rituals that mark and shape the day, something as mindless as the commute that shifts you from one gear to another, none of that registers anymore. There is a frozen-in-place quality to things, an eternal present-ness.

Which is a way of saying that it’s been hard these days for me to find meaning; we are storytelling creatures, but I seem to have lost the plot. I can’t register a story, keep up with a narrative, make sense of any frame. In The Book of Disquiet, though, there seems thus far to be no plot to lose. There are characters and events, but I can find no thread to follow, no causes and effects. Every fragment feels self-contained, its connections to those on either side tenuous at best. As far as I can tell, there is really nothing to be gained from reading the book front to back: you could approach this as bibliomancy, opening at random to find something that speaks to you (no. 27: “To organize our life so that it is a mystery to others, so that those who know us best only unknow us from closer to”). Jull Costa notes that its “incompleteness is enticing, encouraging the reader to make his or her own book out of these fragments.” For me it has been less a building and more a ritual: prayer beads, mantras, a worry stone.

Even more disorienting than the loss of rhythm has been what feels like an extreme shift in perspective. There is a crisis outside, people are terrified, people are fighting for their lives, other people are risking their lives to help them. I am, so far, one of the luckiest, and am counting blessings every morning and crossing my fingers every night—and yet there remain the little things. It feels churlish in these times to be bothered by slow internet, frustrated by a bad hair day, annoyed with a friend over something trivial when I can’t remember the last time I saw him. My heart stops every time I open the news, and somehow I am chewing the same cud I always did.

Not as a distraction but as a counterargument, Pessoa’s book has been, for a couple moments each evening, a helpful companion. To begin with, there is very little of the outside world at all: even when Bernardo Soares is describing how “the dark sky to the south of the Tejo was a sinister black,” the focus of the passage is still Bernardo Soares; the view is always inward. It’s not the melancholy, really, that I’m finding comfort in: it’s the insistence on a self, on the self. Call it what you will, solipsism or self-centeredness, but at the best of times and at the worst of times one is still oneself. And in isolation, one is oneself more than ever. I can’t outrun that, outthink that—and I also can’t be anyone else. So perhaps it is okay, for a little bit of time at night, to think not about what’s happening outside but about something else: “I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.”

Maybe what I’m having trouble with is perspective, balancing a world that has become unrecognizable and unknowable with a me that is yet to adapt. It helps that The Book of Disquiet is also in part a book about how one inhabits one’s city (in this case, Lisbon); yesterday I stumbled upon fragment no. 309, one of Bernardo Soares’s, in which he “daydreams” the journey from the capital to Cascais and back. He is looking forward to watching the landscape and the water, but “on the way there,” he writes, “I lost myself in abstract thoughts, watching, without actually seeing, the waterscapes I was so looking forward to, and on the way back I lost myself in the analysis of those feelings. I would be unable to describe the smallest detail of the trip, the least fragment of what I saw.” New York is still outside my window, I know, but it is transformed (a tent hospital in Central Park, empty subways) and out of reach. Soares’s loss—because it is in some ways a loss—felt like a message. I tried to re-create in my head my favorite walk in the city, in Fort Tryon Park, through the Heather Garden to sit on the Linden Terrace and look across the water at the Palisades. I couldn’t properly recall the small details that mattered—the pattern of the flower beds in the Heather Garden, the weathering of the steps that lead up to the terrace, on which particular bench I last sat. I don’t know when I might next take that walk, but I’d like to believe that when I do, I’ll look more carefully.

Eddie Grace lives in New York.

I can’t be the only one who’s been having trouble focusing on books lately. Everything feels either depressingly dark or depressingly light; I don’t want to be reminded of the news, but how can I care about anything else? I’ve tossed aside several novels in the last week. Only The Secret Garden has held my attention. Only The Secret Garden takes place in a universe I recognize.

When I was a teenager and my little cousin Anya was a toddler, I indoctrinated her into loving Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 film adaptation. I dusted off my beloved videotape (it came with a free locket necklace) and played it for her. Then I played it again, and again and again and again, until the two of us could act it out from memory. Anya was always the heroine, Mary Lennox; I played all the other characters, Peter Sellers–style. One perk of having a cousin twelve years younger than you: it gives you an extra window of time—long after you’re supposedly too old—to play make-believe.

My little cousin Anya is not little anymore; she was about to graduate from college before, you know, all this. Now she’s staying with family in Connecticut. She’s just a half hour drive from my New Haven apartment, but of course we can’t visit each other. We’ve been texting a lot. Yesterday I awoke to this text from her:

Going to get through this by going back to doing Secret Garden re-enactments. Honestly, it’s a parallel situation—I have to leave home because of a contagious illness and live out in the country, finding hope and new life as spring blooms—only issue is I wouldn’t be able to hang out w Dickon because of social distancing [plant emoji]

As a substitute for the hug I wish I could give her, I’ve decided to reread The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel is available for free on Project Gutenberg, so you can read it, too.

I should warn you that it may not take your mind off things. As Anya correctly recalled, the plot is set in motion by an epidemic. The 1993 film changes it to an earthquake, which is more cinematic but (I now think) less harrowing than the novel’s opening chapter, titled “There Is No One Left”:

The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies…. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.

During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours.

…When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before.

With brutal swiftness, nine-year-old Mary is orphaned, removed from colonial India—the only home she’s ever known—and taken to stay with a distant relative in England. But the pathos of her plight is complicated by the novel’s constant, peculiar insistence on her personal unpleasantness. We’re informed in the opening passage that Mary is “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived,” and hardly a paragraph goes by without a reminder that she is “disagreeable,” “a self-absorbed child,” “spoiled and pettish.” Back in India, “Mary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry”; in England, she demands to be dressed by servants “as if she had neither hands nor feet of her own.” Upon learning that a servant girl expected her to be ethnically Indian, Mary throws a fit and screams, “You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people—they’re servants who must salaam to you.”

(I’ve occasionally seen The Secret Garden criticized for colonial attitudes, a complaint that has always puzzled me. The novel has aged poorly in several ways, but I don’t know how you could miss the message that colonialism is a soul-eroding abomination, even for those who benefit from it.)

Mary is terribly alone at Misselthwaite Manor. The house has a hundred rooms, most of them “shut up and locked”; outside is nothing but windswept Yorkshire moor, and Mary feels “so horribly lonely and far away from everything she understood.” Sometimes she hears a voice in the walls—it sounds, she thinks, like “someone crying.” The servants tell her it’s only the wind, and indeed Mary can “scarcely distinguish it from the wind itself.” But late at night, the sobs are unmistakable. She finally goes investigating and finds a little boy, Colin, hidden away in a secret room. They mistake each other, at first, for “a ghost or a dream.” Neither is sure the other is real. They can hardly believe they’re not alone.

(My downstairs neighbor is sick. All day and all night, through the floor, I can hear her coughing. I never knew the floor was so thin.)

Colin has been hidden away, it turns out, because he’s chronically ill; his father doesn’t want to be reminded of him. “No one believes I shall live to grow up,” Colin tells Mary (“as if he was so accustomed to the idea that it had ceased to matter to him at all”). Like Mary, Colin is both a victim of tragedy and a monster of privilege, and Mary is reminded uncomfortably of herself as she watches him abuse his servants. “When she had had a headache in India,” she reflects, “she had done her best to see that everybody else also had a headache or something quite as bad. And she felt she was quite right; but of course now she felt that Colin was quite wrong.”

What could have been a saccharine story—a little girl discovers a secret garden, makes friends, and helps a disabled boy learn to walk—has uneasy psychological stakes. You might even call them spiritual stakes. Tending a secret garden is meaningful work that teaches Mary about human connection, but her character growth goes deeper than that. She comes to understand, I think, that her former life was steeped in evil.

(Evil is a heavy word to hang on anything, let alone a little girl, and just a few weeks ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me to use it. But some things—violence, exploitation, dehumanization—are evil. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so.)

I used to consider the second half of The Secret Garden inferior to the first. As I recalled it, Mary was increasingly sidelined from the narrative until she disappeared altogether, replaced by Colin as protagonist. This unexpected point-of-view shift always frustrated me. Why should Colin’s story take priority over Mary’s? Was it just because he was a boy?

On this reread, however, I realized it’s not so simple. Mary does recede into the background, but the shift isn’t a neat swap from Mary’s perspective to Colin’s perspective. It’s a shift from Mary’s perspective to multiple perspectives. The first half of the novel is omniscient but locked into Mary’s mind, almost claustrophobically so. There are times, in fact, when the narrator doesn’t sound omniscient at all, but more like the dissociated interior monologue of a depressed person:

She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to anyone even when her father and mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be anyone’s little girl. She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of her. She did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable.

But as the novel goes on, the narrator’s consciousness expands. It begins to inhabit other points of view. We get to see through the eyes of Colin; his doctor, Dr. Craven; the housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock; the groundskeeper, Ben Weatherstaff; everyone’s first literary crush, local boy Dickon; Dickon’s mother, Mrs. Sowerby; and, in the end, Colin’s reclusive father. There’s even an entire chapter, whimsical and wonderful, that takes the perspective of a wild robin:

One day the robin remembered that when he himself had been made to learn to fly by his parents … he had taken short flights of a few yards and then had been obliged to rest. So it occurred to him that this boy was learning to fly—or rather to walk. He mentioned this to his mate and when he told her that the Eggs would probably conduct themselves in the same way after they were fledged she was quite comforted and even became eagerly interested and derived great pleasure from watching the boy over the edge of her nest—though she always thought that the Eggs would be much cleverer and learn more quickly. But then she said indulgently that humans were always more clumsy and slow than Eggs and most of them never seemed really to learn to fly at all. You never met them in the air or on tree-tops.

The world seems to be getting bigger and fuller, and Mary doesn’t vanish but merely takes her place in it, among all the others. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the shift in perspective occurs right after this monologue from Dickon’s mother:

“When I was at school my jography told as th’ world was shaped like a orange an’ I found out before I was ten that th’ whole orange doesn’t belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an’ there’s times it seems like there’s not enow quarters to go round. But don’t you—none o’ you—think as you own th’ whole orange or you’ll find out you’re mistaken, an’ you won’t find it out without hard knocks.”

No one owns the whole orange. Everyone has a right to their own bit of a quarter. There’s enough orange to go around—or there can be, if we share.

There’s real beauty in the universe of this book. The garden scenes are ecstatic, charged with a childlike, polymorphous-perverse eroticism:

“See here!” said Dickon. “See how these has pushed up, an’ these an’ these! An’ Eh! Look at these here!”

He threw himself upon his knees and Mary went down beside him. They had come upon a whole clump of crocuses burst into purple and orange and gold. Mary bent her face down and kissed and kissed them.

…They ran from one part of the garden to another and found so many wonders that they were obliged to remind themselves that they must whisper or speak low. He showed her swelling leafbuds on rose branches which had seemed dead. He showed her ten thousand new green points pushing through the mould. They put their eager young noses close to the earth and sniffed its warmed springtime breathing; they dug and pulled and laughed low with rapture until Mistress Mary’s hair was as tumbled as Dickon’s and her cheeks were almost as poppy red as his.

Years ago I read an article that referred to the garden as the “central symbol” of this novel, which is an uncontroversial statement, but the phrasing galled me. The garden is a garden is a garden. As symbols go, springtime is surely the most hackneyed of them all—but springtime, like so many other clichés, is also a stark reality. It’s happening for real outside my window as I write this. The sun is really shining, a real live robin is singing somewhere, and actual daffodils are blooming in the grass beside my stoop. (My downstairs neighbor planted them.)

And over walls and earth and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow above [Colin’s] head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents and scents. And the sun fell warm upon his face like a hand with a lovely touch…

“I shall get well! I shall get well!” he cried out. “Mary! Dickon! I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!”

There was a time, once, when I would have scoffed at this passage. Of course Colin isn’t going to live forever—no one does! As if Frances Hodgson Burnett didn’t know that. She had a son who died of tuberculosis when he was sixteen. He’d been dead for twenty years when she wrote The Secret Garden. It’s easy to forget—or it used to be easy to forget—the nearness of death in those days.

Her narrator continues:

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so.

It’s easy, too, to overlook the point of this passage: that this feeling comes “only now and then,” and only “for a moment or so.” Then it’s gone again.

I have one very distinct memory of playing The Secret Garden with Anya. We were acting out the final scene of the movie: the three children are playing blind man’s bluff, and Colin, blindfolded, runs into his father, who doesn’t yet know that Colin can walk. Colin runs his hands across his father’s face, puzzled, before removing his blindfold. Since I was playing all the non-Mary characters, this scene was my time to shine; I was a high school theater kid, so I really hammed it up. As Colin, I closed my eyes and ran my fingers breathlessly through the air, tracing the shape of an invisible person, my mouth open in amazement. I dragged it out so long, toddler Anya lost her patience. “Hurry up!” she yelled from the sidelines, and I laughed—I’m laughing now, remembering it—because I’d been so wrapped up in myself that I forgot (how could I forget?) that she was in the room.

James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Recently, I’ve found myself drawn to stories about women locked up. I’ve been reading Anna Kavan’s short fiction, in which protagonists are pursued by invisible enemies—nameless perpetrators of “some vast and shadowy plot” against them—and shut in asylums “where days passed like shadows, like dreams.” I’ve finished Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in which two outcast sisters seek refuge from society’s taunts in a crumbling mansion. And I’ve returned to Katherine Mansfield’s restless diaries from the French sanitarium where she died of TB in 1923 (“Felt ill all day … rather like being a beetle shut in a book, so shackled that one can do nothing but lie down”). At a time when neither escapism nor consolation quite appeals, I think I’m enjoying these strange, claustrophobic books for their emotional intensity, their piercing portraits of dissolution, and their dark, absurdist humor in the face of despair.

In my quarantine household, we have a notepad by the bread bin on which we keep a list of the movies we plan to watch in our own indefinite confinement. Last week, we put on An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s 1990 adaptation of Janet Frame’s autobiography, which Hilary Mantel has described as “perhaps the most moving film ever made about a writer.” We meet Janet as a squat, determined child, with a frizzy mop of ginger hair. Over two and a half searing hours, we watch her flounder to find her place in a hostile world, from the unremitting tragedy of her childhood in the New Zealand coastal town Oamaru (a father who beat his children, a brother with severe epilepsy, two older sisters who drowned in separate incidents) to the grim unfolding of her twenties in psychiatric hospitals across the country. In 1945, age twenty-one, Frame was diagnosed as schizophrenic and incarcerated at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where misunderstood patients were routinely condemned to electroconvulsive therapy. Over the subsequent eight years, as she wrote in An Angel at My Table, she “received over two hundred applications of unmodified ECT, each the equivalent in degree of fear, to an execution.” In 1952, while she was awaiting a scheduled lobotomy, it came to the attention of the hospital superintendent that Frame’s book The Lagoon and Other Stories had recently won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. He canceled the operation and Frame was released. She left New Zealand and spent her life living and writing in exile: some of the film’s last scenes show a suntanned, laughing Frame in Ibiza, enjoying a carefree love affair and creative productivity. She died in 2004 as a celebrity, her funeral broadcast live to the nation, her body of work regularly mentioned alongside that of Mansfield, for whose family Frame’s mother had once served as a maid.

Frame wrote Faces in the Water (1961) at the encouragement of a psychiatrist who had reversed the diagnosis of schizophrenia and declared her sane. Convinced that what others saw as madness was rather the symptom of extraordinary creative genius, he suggested she process her experiences by transforming them into fiction. The novel’s Cassandra-figure narrator, Istina Mavet, is confined to an asylum, for unspecified reasons. Removed from daily life, she sits trapped in a small single bedroom, gazing at the cherry blossoms through windows that slide open no more than six inches, while sinister staff in pink uniforms stalk the corridors, keys jangling on their belts. Each morning, the nurses announce the names of those scheduled for ECT: “the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed.” As they approach, Istina attempts to suppress any behavior that might mark her out as volatile: “to leave no trace when I burgled the crammed house of feeling and took for my own use exuberance depression suspicion terror.” She knows that “the doors to the outside world are locked,” so when her name is called, there is no escape: dragged from bed and locked in the observation dormitory, she can hear the faint sounds of the absolved clattering spoons at breakfast. As soaked cotton wool is rubbed on temples, floral screens are drawn down between beds, and pillows placed at an angle, the screams are snuffed into submission, and the patients begin to lose consciousness: “I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the Giant Unreality.”

When Istina denounces the cruelty with which the most vulnerable patients are treated, one nurse scoffs: “Can’t you understand that these people to all intents and purposes are dead?” When a bright doctor suggests that “mental patients were people and therefore might like occasionally to engage in the activities of people,” the result is horrifying “socials” in which inmates are forced to waltz before an audience in a parodic performance that belies the very humanity it’s purported to affirm. Yet Istina refuses to have her “mind cut and tailored to the ways of the world.” Against stern instruction, she strives to preserve her imagination, and her empathy for those around her, in case “a tiny poetic essence could be distilled from their overflowing squalid truth.” Frame’s major theme, across her work, is the disassociation and anguish inherent in living on the threshold between the outside world and the “Mirror City,” as she called it, of an inner life. Her visionary protagonists suffer in a society that feels threatened by those who refuse to conform. Daphne Withers, the heroine of Frame’s debut novel Owls Do Cry, is a child whose imaginative world provides her with a refuge from the illness and poverty in her family; as she grows up, her spirit is sacrificed to an adult world in which poetic vision is an aberration, not a gift, and where doctors are prepared to modify her brain to make Daphne “be just like other people.” Reviewers likened the novel to Goya’s Disasters of War etchings or the work of Dostoyevsky for its exalted depiction of suffering.

Recalling her time at Seacliff, Frame wrote, “I inhabited a territory of loneliness which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return living to the world bring inevitably a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession.” Frame always denied that her books were purely autobiographical. Yet as I read Faces in the Water, spending hours immersed in her shifting, poetic, dreamlike language, it’s clear to me that she’s seeking a literary form to express real truth. Instability and incoherence are embedded within Frame’s rich, associative sentences. Her writing is experimental in the most urgent way possible: in finding her voice, Frame—like Istina — is grappling for a way to survive. In 1947, after the death of her sister, Frame wrote from the asylum to a friend, “We are such sad small people, standing, each alone in a circle, trying to forget that death and terror are near.” But if we “join hands,” she suggested, “we have the strength then to face terror and death, even to laugh and make fun of being alive, and after that even to make more music and writing and dancing.” It’s a remarkably hopeful, generous vision from a writer who has visited the abyss of hopelessness and returned convinced of the power of art.

Read more in our Quarantine Reads series here. 

Francesca Wade is the editor of The White Review. Her book Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars is published by Faber in the UK and in the U.S. by Tim Duggan Books in April.

I started reading Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, a prismatic, nightmarish work of speculative fiction, in New York City a couple weeks ago, when the coronavirus had just begun to spread into the West. Italy had fallen and the threat in the United States was imminent, but the real panic and anxiety still hadn’t sunk in. Stubbornly, and against better judgment, I decided to go through with my plans to take a three-week trip to Japan. I continued reading Dhalgren on my way to Tokyo on March 14. As I was reading on the nearly empty plane, I kept looking down at my hands, getting up, washing them, until they were dry and cracked and my knuckles started bleeding, and by the time I disembarked it looked like I’d been in a fistfight. Dhalgren has been my only real traveling companion this week: gently purring in my hands with the landscape tilting outside the window of the Shinkansen; in the coffee shops of Ginza and Shinjuku, wiped with sanitizer each time, carefully, front and back; and in my lap on a park bench overlooking a river, across which stands the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the battered dome of a ruined building.

The German-language writer Elias Canetti—most famous for his book Crowds and Power—deeply admired Dr. Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, a powerful and lucid account of the days and weeks following the Hiroshima atomic bombing. In a short essay from 1971, Canetti wrote of Dr. Hachiya’s profoundly vivid hellscape, of the uncertainty each new day brought to the doctor’s treatment of victims (while trying to understand what was happening to his own body), and of the doctor’s narration of the ever-shifting new realities of something completely unknown. As Canetti writes, “In the hardship of his own condition, among dead or injured people, the author tries to piece the facts together; with increasing knowledge, his conjectures change, they turn into theories requiring experiment.”

It had been years since I’d first read Canetti’s essay, but the notion that I should reread it popped into my head while I was distractedly strolling through the crowded Hondori shopping district of Hiroshima. It’s difficult, of course, not to jam the coronavirus into every thought, and I couldn’t help but draw connections to the bombing of Hiroshima—and to a fleeting question that Canetti poses in this essay: “Is misfortune the thing that people have most in common?” Walking around Hiroshima today, with the scars of its past barely concealed to anyone looking for them, I noted the surreal and incongruous way the city still functions normally despite the threat of the virus. The city’s past—even the name, Hiroshima, evokes carnage and loss—seemed to offer a brief moment of perspective: bacteria, an invisible terror, feels somehow less threatening when reminded of this human atrocity, of our capacity to inflict destruction upon ourselves.

One of the things that Canetti found most captivating—and horrifying—in Hiroshima Diary was that it was written in real time, as the events unfolded. This sense of narrating and revising the shifting facts resonated with me, not only because of the strange state of the world, but also in thinking about Dhalgren, which, though I’ve been reading every day for the past couple weeks (but don’t these weeks feel like years?), has felt at times impenetrable, surreal, frustrating, unpredictable. Dhalgren eludes me at every turn—I have a notebook now nearly full of scribblings and half-baked ideas about themes I’d wanted pick apart (about hygiene, the uncanny, mythology, race, migration, disaster, et cetera). I keep trying to wave the book in the air to see if the coronavirus waves back.

Dhalgren takes place in the fictional city of Bellona, a city that once had a population of two million but because of a strange disaster (a series of fires? a race riot?), there are only about a thousand inhabitants left there. In general, Bellona is a pretty dangerous place to find yourself: people die unexpectedly; acts of violence or debauchery occur randomly and often; and a gang of thugs, called the Scorpions, run the streets by night. To stay safe, it’s best to wear an orchid, a bladed weapon that I imagine looks like the Wolverine’s fist, if you have one.

Soon after arriving in Bellona, Kidd (or Kid, or the kid—he’s not even sure of his own name) meets Tak Loufer, who, in these first pages, serves as a guide to the ravaged city. Laufer explains, “You know, here… you’re free. No laws, to break or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become… exactly who you are.” Kidd, is, as he soon discovers, a poet. But he is also a nomad, a flaneur, an adventurer, an eyewitness.

The reader explores the city of Bellona through Kidd’s fragmentary perceptions: time unfolds in loopy swirls because, for the most part, Kidd is figuring things out as he goes and he has a very tenuous relationship not only with his own consciousness but also with his past. Some conversations or events happen multiple times—seen from different angles, in different lights—while other, seemingly important details are withheld indefinitely. Ideas and images are introduced, partially developed, refracted, cut down. Reading Dhalgren is a bit like being held upside down from your ankles and dangled off the back of a speeding truck.

My own reality this week has rivaled the novel’s uncertainty. I’ve changed my return flight four times so far, committing to the irresponsible delusion that I might be able to outwit the spread of disease. To travel under these conditions you need to be delusional, selfish, a little stupid, always ready to embrace the unknown. In Japan, where I speak the language with the proficiency of a toddler, I’m never quite sure what’s happening around me, what the real situation is here. Am I in danger? What awaits me back home? Am I invisible enough—keeping enough distance, using enough sanitizer, wearing a mask enough, am I in safe spaces? The trains, bars, restaurants, and department stores are still, as of today, full of people. But this could change at any moment. One Japanese friend said that things are much worse than they appear but the government has been downplaying the crisis—there was a similar response, and mistrust of Japanese public statements, after Fukushima. Another person I spoke to, a friend from high school (who used to be a reasonable person, maybe a little too gullible back then), said that he’d heard the coronavirus was an act of bioterrorism, somehow perpetuated worldwide, but sparing Japan, by a group of Jewish Zionists living on the small island of Awaji in Japan’s Inland Sea. I couldn’t make sense of this bizarre notion, which seems to be the conflation of several different wild conspiracy theories. One rare certainty this week: I will not fear of the Awaji Jews.

In Tokyo, everyone wears a face mask. Not everyone, but nearly. Talismans, shields, work most efficiently against the ineffable. I’ve seen thousands of faces but very few smiles. A few days ago, I saw a well-dressed businessman on his lunch break at a ramen restaurant, wearing a face mask, who daintily pulled the mask above his upper lip before he slurped each bite of noodles, and then chewed with the mask lowered. It must’ve taken him much longer to eat this way. I feel a kinship with the absurdity of this ramen eater, who, rather than dining safely at home, would sacrifice his dignity in order to enjoy a meal. But this was an anomaly. Most people seem to move about as they normally would. “If a bomb had fallen, we’d be dead. This is something perfectly natural. And we have to make do, don’t we, until the situation is rectified?” the almost unflappable Mrs. Richards explains to Kidd. He’s come over to help her family move apartments—another largely symbolic gesture of normalcy in the face of crisis.

As I’ve been reading Dhalgren, I keep seeing strange parallels to the proliferating unknowns of traveling (or even staying put) during the coronavirus. The novel demands qualities of its reader—patience, flexibility in most things, stubbornness in others, paranoia—that are also helpful now. One of my favorite characters in the book, the perfectly pretentious, rambling poet from New Zealand, Ernest Newboy, states midway through the novel: “There’s no reason why all art should appeal to all people.” Dhalgren isn’t for everyone. Delany’s formal and linguistic experimentations are a bumpy road to follow. It’s not a very comforting book, and, of course, it’s not a comforting time to be traveling either. In hindsight, Dhalgren probably isn’t the book I should be reading during the plague, but it might be the book that I deserve.

Read more in our Quarantine Reads series here

Many conversations I’m having at the moment—you, too, probably—include a preamble that tries to acknowledge the current situation: “It feels, I don’t know, unreal? Like a dream, or a nightmare. I can’t quite grasp the enormity of it. I keep expecting to wake up and find that normality has resumed.” Meanwhile my actual sleep tends to feature classic anxiety dreams—of being lost, delayed, imperiled, accidentally in the wrong place or at the wrong time, dropped into a context both familiar and alien—that cause an abrupt awakening in the small hours. Displacing the bewilderment of the dream with waking reality is, obviously, not much of a relief. Especially if attempted via my usual method of scrolling Twitter.

Instead, I’ve been rereading a novel that captures the peculiar landscape of dreams with an accuracy few other authors have come close to: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. When I first read it, soon after it came out in 1995, I was at first intimidated (not least by its 500+ pages), then progressively awed but also perplexed by Ishiguro’s flagrant jettisoning of fiction’s rules. Isn’t it cheating, for instance, to let your first person narrator access the inner life of whomever he meets? Now, though, with a further quarter-century of anxiety dreams behind me, and with life as we know it splintering and dislocating before our eyes, I found myself submitting utterly to the novel’s uncanny, déjà vu–steeped spell.

Mr. Ryder, an English pianist of international renown, has arrived at a hotel in a small Central European city, where he is to give a recital at an important concert. His visit has high stakes for the city, which is suffering a loss of civic morale due, somehow, to the decline of the local classical music scene. A once-distinguished conductor, Mr. Brodsky, has become a pitiful alcoholic; a cellist, Mr. Christoff, has fallen calamitously out of favor. There is, Ryder is told, a “spiral of misery gaining ever greater momentum at the heart of our community.” But as he is repeatedly reminded, his recital—and his very presence—will restore the city’s reputation and the self-esteem of the populace. Everyone he encounters is obsequious and needy in equal measure, insisting between blandishments that he bestow random favors and perform small services. It all conspires to derail the packed timetable of activities planned for his two-day stay. He keeps emphasizing, with mounting impatience but to no avail, “I have a particularly tight schedule…”

To make matters worse, Ryder cannot recall the details of his schedule, nor where his copy of it might be. All he knows is that the concert, on which so much depends, is to take place on his final evening. As successive obstacles threaten his fulfillment of his principal obligation, and as the precious hours tick away, he is deprived of food, sleep, and crucial preparation for the big night. While it is harrowing to read, the feeling elicited is not so much suspense—clearly, a triumphant conclusion is not on the cards—as a rare and heady familiarity.

All the classic nocturnal manifestations of a tense mind are here. Ryder realizes, to his horror, that he hasn’t practiced for the concert. He hasn’t even chosen which piece to perform! But he is hampered in doing so by encounters with strangers who are also old friends from school, or with whom he shares a murkier yet tangled past. Situations outside his purview are suddenly his absolute responsibility, and guilt trips abound. When he needs to correct a critical misunderstanding, he tries desperately to speak, but only grunts emerge. Inevitably, the normal laws of time and space are in abeyance. A formal dinner a long drive away turns out, when Ryder tries later to leave the event, to be taking place in the atrium of his hotel. His hotel room, it dawns on him, “was the very room that had served as my bedroom during the two years my parents and I had lived at my aunt’s house on the borders of England and Wales.”

Within the anarchic playing out of dream logic, Ishiguro weaves several strands of conventional plot that, as they deepen and build, withstand the confusion of Ryder’s perspective. The conductor, Mr. Brodsky, is trying to affect a reconciliation with his long-estranged former love. An elderly hotel porter, Gustav, hopes to mend his strained relationship with his daughter, Sophie. The hotel manager and concert organizer, Mr. Hoffmann, wants to win the respect of his disappointed wife. And their son, Stephan, plans to heal unspoken family rifts by displaying his own underestimated gifts as a pianist at the concert.

Each figure in a dream, the theory goes, represents an aspect of ourselves. As Ishiguro has acknowledged, this is true of Ryder, whose excellence as a musician grew from a longing to reconcile his warring parents. In his subconscious, as in all of ours, the terror of failure, rejection, and humiliation lives on, not to be mollified by any level of worldly success. Achievement and respectability or “duty,” Ishiguro tells us throughout his fiction, are unworthy substitutes for, and often impediments to, the intimacies that give life true meaning. The city in The Unconsoled won’t cure its malaise by pursuing cultural prestige, Ryder cannot redeem his unhappy childhood by giving the best performance of his career, and the other characters are misguided to view living up to their imagined potential, to others’ elusive expectations, as the key to deserving love.

Ishiguro, who has written seven novels and was made a Nobel Laureate in 2017, maintains no fidelity in his body of work to any historical era, geographical setting, or type of protagonist in terms of age, gender, or class. What does recur is his exquisitely attuned rendering of human fragility, the tragedy of self-deceit, and the almost unbearable poignancy in people trying, despite setbacks and injured pride, to get things right. The Unconsoled, his fourth novel, is no exception. Yet on publication it was dismissed, more often than not, as an ill-advised departure, an overlong flight of fancy. “The short attention span of readers and critics in the electronic age,” lamented Anita Brookner, who loved it, “was never more amply demonstrated.” Perhaps in this time of unprecedented mass isolation, readers will have the time and the mindset to appreciate Ishiguro’s unorthodox inquiry into the costs of emotional alienation. Poor Mr. Brodsky, brought to rock bottom and warned he is headed for a dark and lonely place, now speaks for all too many of us: “I don’t want to go, Ryder … I don’t want to go.”

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, Longreads, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Awl, Words without Borders, and other publications. Read her Feminize Your Canon column for The Paris Review Daily here.

An extended self-quarantine resembles, in many aspects, any religious-minded circumscribing of the daily round—a meditation retreat, a monastic cloister, a ritual purification. There is the same restraining force, liminal and protean, keeping one within the enclosure—not quite mandatory, not quite voluntary, but a volatile mixture of superego, conformity, altruism, and the anxiety of social sanction. There is the withdrawal from social life, the distillation of most personal interaction to the telegrammatic and unavoidable. There is the ascendance of repetition—the same cycle of meals, the same rooms, the same window, the same orbit of light from that window. And within that tightened repetition, unintentionally noticing, finding yourself incapable of ignoring, certain physical tics and emotional reflexes, patterns that were previously subliminal. Brushing a chip in the wall paint as you round a corner, lifting yourself just barely but entirely off your chair as you pull into the kitchen table, discovering the tonic thrum of the refrigerator under the clicking of the kitchen clock, the uniquely personal sound and resonance of your spoon scraping, inadvertently but consistently, on the chipped bottom of your bowl. Both retreat and quarantined life become microcosm magnified to macrocosm, like the map drawn to the same scale as its territory in Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science.” The most minor elements of the daily routine flower to monstrous proportion—I have known, in the midst of a retreat, the consumptive, totalizing desire for just one extra bread roll; the tattooed memorization of the flowering, spidery cracks on a poorly plastered ceiling; the gnawing curiosity about what lay beyond the finite universe to which I had confined myself. And above all, there is the imperative to focus obsessively and intentionally on reflexive actions that were, in the previous life, unnoticed, the white noise of bodily existence—in the case of a meditation retreat, it is one’s breath; in the case of the coronavirus, touching one’s face moves from compulsive background to neurotic foreground. Every touch is monitored, assessed, brooded over.

And alongside this radical shift in scale, there emerges a deepening capacity for interiority, as if cloud cover had burned off a valley floor, revealing in sharpness each tiny aspect of the scene, diorama-like. It becomes easier and more natural to follow internal trains of thought; the inner monologue grows louder, more assertive; and the inner vision vivifies, leaning asymptotically toward eruption, tangibility. It is a paradoxical state, both heightened and diminished, murky and transparent, perfectly captured by V. S. Naipaul in his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. He frames it, fittingly, as a variety of illness, a childhood “fever,” writing:

A great tiredness, not unpleasant, a tiredness with the little delirium that—alas, too rarely—had come to me as a child with a tropical “fever,” this fever associated with the chill of the rainy season, the season of extravagant, dramatic weather, of interruptions in routine, of days off from school because of rain and floods, and the coughs and fevers to which they gave rise. How often, as a child, having had my fever, I had longed to have it all over again, to experience all the distortions of perception it brought about: the extraordinary sense of smoothness (not only to one’s touch, but also in one’s mouth and stomach), and, with that, voices and noises becoming oddly remote and exciting. I had never had fever as often as I would have liked.

The “distortion” extends both outward, to the touch, and inward, to the sense of the body itself. A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand.

It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption. The opening of the first monologue describes the strong spectral presence of the novel itself, lays down its own gauntlet: “‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’” I have read the opening pages at least a dozen times, but have not yet been able to string together the unbroken attention required. There is no better opportunity than this moment to try again, for The Waves is itself about this estranging and revealing state. The characters, in a ring, each take turns to talk to themselves, speaking to their interior landscapes with total clarity, and with all the hallmarks of extended isolation—the simultaneous telescopic intensity and dazed distance, the noticing of sensation and reflex as if they were new, numinous. Goes the round of private proclamation: “‘A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,’ said Susan, ‘notched with blunt feet.’ ‘The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said Rhoda. ‘And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out of the grasses,’ said Louis. ‘Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, rounded or pointed, separately.’ ‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’” The descriptions of the exterior world are, fittingly, given to a disembodied third party, with a suprahuman eye—a bracing blast from the outside, to which we will eventually and inexorably return. For now, though, we are given the time to explore the close, feverish, interior world of The Waves.  

Matt Levin is a writer living in Uganda.