What to do in quarantine
Roma Rodriguez argues that we should use this unexpected period of isolation to catch up with the world’s great literature.
Friends of mine keep asking me “what am I going to do with my life for six months?”, “how am I going to fill the time?”, “how am I going to stay sane when there’s nothing to do at home?”.
With self-isolation and government-, or, indeed, neighbour-enforced quarantine looming ominously on the horizon, these seem like pertinent questions. However, they are fundamentally inane, betraying an acute lack of imagination and an inability to cherish one’s own company.
What all healthy quarantined people are about to experience is a prolonged period of contemplative leisure, what the Renaissance Platonist tradition referred to as otium. Building on Plato’s ideal model of training for his philosopher kings, the Renaissance Platonists postulated that otium was necessary for the cultivation of the virtues - our highest ends - and, therefore, the attainment of the greatest happiness.
The lives we have hitherto been leading have, in Platonist terms, been ones of negotium or civic participation. Such lives, the Platonists maintained, were to be avoided at all costs, because of their intrinsic corruptness and temporal, rather than psychic boons. In the words of Reginald Pole, one of the interlocutors in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, a life of civic participation, the vita activa, leaves the wise man “nothing obtaining but only to be corrupt with like opinions as they be which meddle therewith”.
I do not suggest that all of us soon-to-be-quarantined-folk engage in an exegesis of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus, although such an exercise would, according to the Platonists, generate the greatest happiness. I simply propose that everyone reads more.
There are few better remedies for acute cabin-fever than escapist literature. Suddenly the gossamer that gathers in one’s mind is blown away and the dreadful dreariness of immobility alleviated. One no longer feels incarcerated in the cell that is one’s home, for the mind captivated by the book is like the sparrow that is able to escape through the grating on the prison window. The Marco Polo diary, the Waverley novel, the Jules Verne adventure, the Tolkien saga, the Ian Fleming thriller, the Cormac McCarthy nerve-shredder all have the magical power of transporting one to another place. Of sucking one into the world of that particular book. Foreign tongues are spoken, unfamiliar environments and terrains emerge, cultural curiosities and foibles abound, and laughter, cries, curses, smells, foods, feelings, dreams all combine in an experiential kaleidoscope. And every page rotates its pieces, forming a new, yet more enthralling and enigmatic pattern.
Most crucially, however, the good escapist book nourishes and enriches one’s imagination. With the world at our fingertips and international travel a norm until a few days ago, over the last two decades we as society have gradually eroded our own imagination and with it our enjoyment of our own company. So, as an enormous amount of free time edges nearer, my advice is simple. Read, read, and read again.
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