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Learning in Virus-Time
One of the conventions of the virus-time is for scribblers to publish lists of suggested books that might help cope with homebound isolation (and with the slowdown of the movie streaming service).
Some reading lists address understanding and dealing with the alarming nature of a time in which the comforts of brief periods of stability collapse because they have no foundations, and the essential uncertainty of the human condition is revealed. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning comes to mind, as does much of literature. Tolkien’s mythologies contrast the transient with the transcendent, as do both the fiction and the scholarly writings of C. S. Lewis. Especially relevant just now is his essay, “Learning in War-time” (http://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/Lewis.Learning%20in%20War-Time.pdf). In children’s literature, even Peter Rabbit must cope with the reality that his father ended up as rabbit pie.
Other lists feature escapism as therapy, and that’s necessary too; constant attention to the news is unhealthy. A good dose of Louis L’Amour, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, James Bond, and Barbara Cartland provide a necessary therapy.
Not so very long ago in calendar time but very long ago in virus-time I asked a (brilliant) student who always came to my class with personal reading what books she had been exploring in the two or three months since term had begun. She thoughtfully wrote out the list for me:
I Am not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Erika Sanchez
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Tell Me How it Ends: an Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli
How to Become a Straight-A Student, Cal Newport
The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
The Love Poems of RUMI
I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me, Hugh Prather
None of these books was assigned; like all thoughtful people my student always had a book to consider between classes, work, footer, dance, and her job: a novel with Mexican-American-adolescent themes, a novel a German teen soldier in the First World War, a study in immigration, a how-to about doing better in school, a childhood comfort-book as a vade mecum, a book of poetry, and, well, with an icky-sugary title such as I Touch the Earth Blah Blah Blah I investigated no further. Not all men are strong enough to withstand such a horror.
The point is that an exceptional young woman considered her world through dance and music and assigned thinky-stuff and sports and work, and also through the thoughts of others through lots of good books. And all without a national shutdown and threats of temporal harm to prompt her. We should be more like her.
Men…propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.
-CSL, “Learning in War-Time,” 22 October 1939
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