Alone again ... unnaturally!

I clearly recall the perplexed, confused expressions on my students' faces in what seems like centuries ago, when I told them what social distancing will require each of us to do.  I told them that while we might want to seek solace in the company of fellow humans, especially our close friends and families, we will have to stay apart.

The forced isolation in response to COVID-19 is harsh.  Even in our regular lives we don't like living alone, as Jill Lepore writes recalling her own experience:

I tried living alone when I was twenty-five, because it seemed important to me, the way owning a piece of furniture that I did not find on the street seemed important to me, as a sign that I had come of age, could pay rent without subletting a sublet. I could afford to buy privacy, I might say now, but then I’m sure I would have said that I had become “my own person.” I lasted only two months. I didn’t like watching television alone, and also I didn’t have a television, and this, if not the golden age of television, was the golden age of “The Simpsons,” so I started watching television with the person who lived in the apartment next door. I moved in with him, and then I married him.

At least that was her wanting to be alone.  By herself.  Our isolation in the time of the coronavirus is not from a willingness.  It is from a fear of an invisible pathogen.  A villain so tiny that we can't even see what we are holed up against.  Loneliness in this context is different from loneliness that my grandfather might have felt in Varanasi.

As Lepore writes, we are not wired for being sealed in, especially during a crisis:

Then the great, global confinement began: enforced isolation, social distancing, shutdowns, lockdowns, a human but inhuman zoological garden. Zoom is better than nothing. But for how long? And what about the moment your connection crashes: the panic, the last tie severed? It is a terrible, frightful experiment, a test of the human capacity to bear loneliness. Do you pull out your hair? Do you dash yourself against the walls of your cage? Do you, locked inside, thrash and cry and moan? Sometimes, rarely, or never? More today than yesterday?

One.Day.At.A.Time!