Journal of a plague year (or week, at any rate)

Obviously with the coronavirus situation we are all confronting in new ways the facts of our mortality—and, less dramatically perhaps, the impermanence of things. Most of us will survive this pandemic. We will all eventually emerge from our various states of quarantine, social distancing, remote working, etc. But the world we come back to may not be the same.

There are obviously any number of horrific ways in which this may prove to be the case. But, selfishly and stupidly perhaps, my thoughts along these lines tend for the moment to fasten onto one bite-sized and manageable idea: used book stores. Will they still be there, when all of this is over?

Many of them, we know, are already financially on the brink. I have had the bitter experience before of remembering that I saw a book on the shelves of one of them, months previously, and driving over in order to buy it—only to discover the store has closed its doors permanently in the meantime. What will it mean for these stores now to lose potentially months of income, and still have to pay rent?

Just the week before last, I was browsing the shelves of a store in Harvard Square. Two things that caught my eye as an eventual-read, but not an immediate-read, where the copies they had in supply of Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, as well as Donald Spoto's celebrated biography of Alfred Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius. 

Since neither one of these were books I intended to read in the next few days or weeks, and didn't seem irresistibly likely to fly off the shelves in the interval, I noted them down mentally but did not buy them on the spot. This is my usual procedure. I go in. I observe and mentally catalog. Then I go home, and allow the various books to simmer and percolate in my mind.

A few days later, I am sure: I must go and buy those books.

But here's the rub. In the time of coronavirus, my standard procedure breaks down. I did not buy Byron and Spoto on the spot, because I figured I could come back and do so in a few days or weeks. But now, that time has passed. I am social distancing at my sister's home a two hour's drive away from the store where I glimpsed these treasures. Most stores have closed down temporarily.

Was it so irrational of me to have delayed the purchase? Who could have predicted that, in the interval, society would crumble? And, when all of this is over and we emerge from isolation, will the store be in operation? Will they still have the longed-for books in stock?

The ancient advice never to put off and delay for tomorrow what can be done today comes back to one with brutal force in the midst of a pandemic. One dawdles on doing something for the present because one assumes one's life and the world will still be there, much the same as they were before, by the time one makes up one's mind.

But one doesn't actually know this to be true. As Paul Bowles writes, in The Sheltering Sky: "because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood; some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

The Bowles-like character who delivers this speech, Port, will be dead in the course of the novel—before it is even four-fifths complete.

Not being able to buy a book by Donald Spoto may be small potatoes in the soup of life's disappointments. But it is one small signifier of the changes at hand that I can latch my brain onto and try to wrestle into some sort of cognizance.

We will not be here forever. Our society will not be here forever. And the things we put off today may not still be waiting for us when we are ready to take them up again. "Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow," as Shelley writes. "Nought may endure but Mutability."