We Can’t Comprehend This Much Sorrow

This year has been a blur, but I remember one day clearly: Sunday, March 8. It was the last day I ate at a restaurant, the last day I went to a concert (Red Baraat at the Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass.) and the last day I hugged a friend. It was also the first time I thought that I should begin writing about what was going on.

That thought was immediately followed by its negation: Why bother? The same incidents, the same references and the same outrages would inevitably be picked over by other writers; for all our social distancing, we’d all be crowding around the same material. I also knew that anything I wrote could soon be — in fact was almost certain to be — contradicted by new developments. But what worried me most was that certain points of emphasis in my writing would later prove to have been misjudged, and that this would somehow reveal that my heart had been in the wrong place all along.

By mid-April, the daily death toll had risen to terrifying heights. But then those numbers fluctuated and at times fell, and it appeared that the worst was over. We seemed to be in for a significant sequence of days. So I set down a week’s worth of observations, hoping to capture, with no attempt at being comprehensive, a time when my feelings were as raw as my understanding of what was happening.

Saturday, April 11

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 996 people. It is unbelievable to be living through this. I am in Cambridge, but I am obsessed by the New York numbers. We know that history is not over, that enormous events are inevitable. But the mind takes time to adjust. It still feels unreal to wake up every morning in a world as strange as dreams.

I saw a photograph by a Bosnian photographer named Ziyah Gafic. Posted on his Instagram account, it showed undertakers in a Sarajevo graveyard. There were four of them, seated, standing, resting on gravestones. They were masked and clad in the full-body white suits of the familiar new priesthood. I was reminded of a pen-and-ink drawing of beekeepers by Bruegel. The same muffled air of mystery.

My sister, a doctor in Michigan, texted me a couple of days ago: ‘‘My first patient today was a 22-year-old prison worker who had been exposed and was now short of breath. I felt a wave of panic. Then I just did my job.’’

Sunday, April 12

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 997 people. I am looking at the bird feeder outside my window. A squirrel has figured out how to clamber up the supporting pole, and now it hangs on, busily eating, looking both awkward and comfortable. The boreal chickadees are irritated. From time to time a cardinal appears, like a splash of red paint.

A scene in a film I watched the other day — a not very good one from 2013 called ‘‘On My Way,’’ starring Catherine Deneuve — was set in a restaurant. The clinking of glasses, that sound alone, filled me with such longing. Much of what I miss is tied to dumb privilege. And yesterday, outside the wine shop (speaking of privilege) in nearby Belmont, as a number of us waited for our pickup — masked, observing appropriate social distance — one man with a thick Latin American accent said: ‘‘Is like a movie. But nobody waking yet.’’ I was suddenly spooked, as in a dream when you become aware you’re in a dream only after someone says it.

Monday, April 13

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 957 people. My mother turned 70 last week. A few days before her birthday, she sent a carefully worded text to all her friends and family asking them to celebrate with her by staying in their homes. My parents live in Lagos, Nigeria, and they are taking the quarantine rules seriously. Their daily situation over there is much the same as mine here in Cambridge. We are fortunate in the same ways: There is enough food in the pantry for a few weeks, and there is no pressing need to leave the house. It is hard for others in Nigeria. Huge numbers of daily wage earners, street traders and informal workers have to feed themselves and their dependents. How are they doing it? Asking certain people to stay home for the sake of society is absurd, because these are people society has never cared about. ‘‘Stay home so people won’t die’’ is a hell of a thing to say to those who are dying of hunger. I keep thinking about floods, and how only after the waters recede do the bodies of the drowned become visible.

I’m listening to kora music played by Ballaké Sissoko. I’m listening to Beethoven, the early sonatas. In these bruising days, any delicately made thing quickens the heart.

Tuesday, April 14

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 882 people. It surprises me that I can still listen to so much music every day, and that I still want to. Listening to MF DOOM, I find myself thinking about what hip-hop is and what it means in a moment like this. Music of all kinds thrives socially, but some genres tolerate solitude better than others. Hip-hop isn’t really alive unless someone else hears it: It is social all the way down to its genetic code. These days, DJ Nice is hosting parties that are viewed by a huge audience on Instagram Live. Last weekend, also on Instagram Live, there was a battle between DJ Premier, who was spinning from isolation in New York, and RZA, who was spinning from isolation in California. I watched and listened with thousands of others, creating with them the feeling of being in a crowd, wishing that the crowd could be embodied.

Wednesday, April 15

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 1,003 people. It is a clear, bright day in Cambridge. Flowers are blooming outside. K fills the house with cuttings from her tulip beds and from the cherry tree. There are four grinning daffodils in a clear vase.

People are dying in hospitals and dying at home. The official tolls are almost certainly an undercount. The morgues are overflowing. Those are the facts. But where is the grief? When we first started getting the news out of Italy, and then Spain, with frightening daily numbers comparable with what is now happening in New York, that news seemed to be delivered with holy awe. In El País, for example, each day’s news was led by the previous day’s dead, a number that was often in the paper’s main headline. In the American papers, I usually have to do some searching to find how many people have died in the past day. The front pages here seem to often carry news of the financial markets or of the political squabbles of the day. But what I want is to be directly confronted with the fact, the enormity, the irreducible sadness of all these deaths.

A friend of mine attended a Zoom funeral last week for his grandmother. My neighbor attended a Zoom funeral last week for his father. A tragic, sordid phrase that wouldn’t have meant anything just a few weeks ago: ‘‘Zoom funeral.’’ Zoom is a for-profit company, and it is currently very profitable.

Thursday, April 16

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 936 people. The numbers are bad in Massachusetts, over a hundred per day at the moment, but nowhere near as grim as in New York.

I talked to my mother on the phone. She says there are roving gangs of young men in Lagos. They are stopping and raiding food trucks and sometimes invading people’s homes. I tell her, thinking of Jean Valjean, that you can hardly blame a hungry man for stealing bread. She says, ‘‘That’s true, but how would you feel if it was your home they invaded?’’

I haven’t been outside in a few days. I go out after 4 p.m., and the streets are busy with walkers and joggers. There is a profusion of beautiful spring flowers, and many more masks on the streets now, in keeping with the latest directives. I’m wearing one.

In Bruegel’s drawing, there are three beekeepers and a fourth person, whose body is turned away from us. He has climbed up a tree, presumably to take the eggs out of a bird’s nest. Is the drawing meant to contrast the active life (the man in the tree) with the contemplative life (the beekeepers)? No one knows for sure. It’s not only the atmosphere of the drawing that is mysterious; its meaning, too, is unknown and has eluded generations of scholars.

When I return from my walk, I have a phone chat with my cousin, who works as a sorter at one of Amazon’s warehouses in the Atlanta area. She immigrated to the United States in September and has just been upgraded to full-time status at the warehouse. Her younger sister, who has been here longer, is a full-time nurse on the Covid-19 unit of a large teaching hospital. She tells me she’s being offered overtime, for good pay, but that she doesn’t want to do it because of the elevated risk.

Unbelievable to be living through this? No, it’s believable. I believe it, the way you wake up in the middle of the night on a trans-Atlantic flight and believe: I am 35,000 feet above sea level, moving at tremendous speed through freezing air.

Friday, April 17

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 732 people. I can hardly concentrate in daytime. At night, I read Annie Ernaux’s ‘‘The Years.’’ You can feel the pulse and intelligence of Ernaux’s mind, her technical facility, the range of her assessments over several decades of French history. The book, which mixes history with memoir, is good writing. Eventually, there will be good writing about our moment as well. If journalism is the first rough draft of history, perhaps a journal is the first rough draft of literature. But grief makes me sour. I feel as though I’ve read the same piece of white writing 30 times in the past month.

Much of it is concerned with inconveniences, and some of it is jokey. I understand these collective attempts at lightness, but I quarrel with them, because I know that in the United States there is no ‘‘collective.’’ Levity in the midst of sorrow can be a consolation if the sorrow is shared to begin with. But here, where everything is divided, where the unscathed can’t quite believe the wounded, the levity sounds like anything but solidarity. Covid-19 was initially heralded as a great equalizer, and there was some evidence of this in some countries. But it arrived in America and immediately became American: classist, capitalist, complacent.

The words Samuel Beckett wrote to his friend Alan Schneider in 1963 feel like a lifeline: ‘‘I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.’’

Saturday, April 18

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Yesterday’s death toll from Covid-19 in New York State was 804 people. There’s consolation in the falling numbers, sure, but I mostly think about how, with better leadership, far fewer people would be bereaved right now. But leaders are nothing without their followers, and many Americans have decided to inhabit an alternate reality. What is newly shocking is realizing that their fanciful reality is impervious to everything, even a horrifying daily death toll.

It began to rain just before I slept last night. This morning there was snow on the ground in patches. K had read the weather report. To protect her roses, she had brought in what she could and had covered what she couldn’t. The tulips out front look sad. The small birds are at the feeder, but there’s no squirrel to bother them. It’s almost a week since I saw the cardinal. My sister has her first week off in a very long time. Being a doctor means witnessing suffering and death, but this past month has been something else. I feel visceral relief for her, as though I were the one on vacation.

I want to weep. I can’t weep; I can’t write either. Is shock necessarily naïve? Can’t it also be evidence of taking in, and being affected by, new information?

I’m still thinking about ‘‘Zoom funerals.’’ There’s good reason the earliest surviving traces of many civilizations have to do with the burial of the dead: tombs, barrows, tumuli. In Sophocles’ ‘‘Antigone,’’ King Creon denies funeral rites to Polynices. Polynices is dead anyway and won’t know in what manner his body is disposed of — but Antigone knows, and we know, and it is what the living know that matters. Our need for proper ritual will never subside.

We are eager to find out what an old text can say to our new situation. But ‘‘Antigone’’ won’t tell you what to do in the time of Covid-19. The play is about individual conscience against the state, loyalty to family, funerary customs, the clash between two varieties of self-contradiction and, above all, the workings of tragedy. Tragedy is not simply that something bad happens; it’s that one thing leads to another: if this, then that, and if that, then the other thing. In Seamus Heaney’s version of ‘‘Antigone,’’ ‘‘The Burial at Thebes,’’ he has the chorus declare: ‘‘It starts like an undulation underwater,/A surge that hauls black sand up off the bottom,/Then turns itself into a tidal current. . . .’’

One thing leads to another. Polynices dies in battle, and Antigone, for defying the directive to leave him unburied, is sentenced to death. She hangs herself. Haemon, to whom she was engaged, kills himself with a sword. Eurydice, grieving her son, also commits suicide. Hubris, cruelty, and next thing you know, an entire generation is brought to grief. We can see the tidal current and the wreckage in its wake; but why has it happened? All we know is that different choices would have led to a different outcome.

Teju Cole teaches writing at Harvard. His photobook "Fernweh" was published in February. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

My quarantine has been fine. I was able to get out of the city; I don’t have the virus; I’ve lost some work, but not all of it; and just under 17 percent of my immediate family members have fallen seriously ill. I’ve made out beautifully, and I feel terribly unhappy: a pair of conditions that are tough to either reconcile or deny. Like characters in an Edgar Allan Poe story, every person I know is suddenly confined to a small space and forced to meditate on existence, death and his or her own satanic impulses. The physical manifestations of my own dread have included insomnia, a bumper crop of gray hairs and an absence of self-control around any form of alcohol or drug. At some point my ribs became countable. I daydream about which elected officials most deserve to get Covid. Being an inessential worker in every sense of the word, there has been no obvious way for me to channel my bad feelings into civically productive activities. If I can’t be productive, I have three choices: Do nothing, do destructive things or do neutral things.

The adaptations began during my third week of quarantine. Over the course of a routine internet stroll, I discovered a ‘‘natural lifestyle coach’’ named Tony Riddle. Riddle looks like a Viking warlord and does stuff like try to run 900 miles across the entire length of Britain barefoot. He has sinuous muscles and four children and does not believe in normal furniture, especially chairs, which he considers unnatural and expendable. His home contains none. Instead, he recommends ‘‘ground living’’: banishing furniture in favor of endless variations on squatting and kneeling. This, according to him, helps nourish a person’s ankles, knees and hips, as well as ‘‘rewilding’’ her feet. I watched a hypnotic two-minute video of Riddle, serene and barefoot, as he moved through 10 positions designed to help support my ‘‘ancestral movement system.’’ Was he a maniac? A genius? Only one way to find out.

I spent a day working from the floor, squatting before and around my computer as though it were a campfire, with glutes aflame and feet unshod. ‘‘This is how a monkey sees the world,’’ I thought, dreamily. It was the calmest I’d felt in days. If lacking something as fundamental as furniture did not impair my life, perhaps the same could be true of recently banned fundamentals, like social contact or walking outdoors without a muzzle. When people talk about fasting, this is what they talk about: the surge of power that arises from realizing you don’t need what you thought you did.

And so other behavior modifications followed, all of them minor acts of norm-shedding. I wandered around naked and stayed up all night. I paced thousands of laps around the kitchen table. I slept in places that were not my bed. I ate a meal without using my hands or any utensils, like a dog, just to see what it was like. (Sloppy, as I expected.) I coaxed a group of wild turkeys out of the woods with a trail of sunflower seeds that I placed in a circle, which they obediently traced. I tried to attract other birds by sitting quietly on the porch cloaked in seeds but had to go back inside after being menaced by a squirrel.

None of these ‘‘hobbies’’ were fascinating or impressive — and they’re even less so when I type them out — but they were placating, free and legal. I couldn’t stop finding harebrained new ways to warp reality. Little by little, my fidelity to personhood diminished. I spent hours sitting on the carpet against a wall, doing nothing except considering. I considered investigating the stain under the boiler. I considered making banana bread. I considered cleaning the gutters. The word ‘‘consider’’ implies, correctly, that these thoughts at no point turned into actions. During one morning of considering I felt my head entering the wall, or sort of dipping in and out of it. This went on for a minute before the sensation faded and was replaced with a moment of alarm at the banality of the hallucination, which was like being on the world’s lamest drug: Instead of experiencing ego death, I momentarily penetrated a sheet of drywall. What was the life-altering lesson in that? ‘‘Sleep more,’’ maybe.

Some years ago a friend of mine lived with a community called the Bruderhof. The Bruderhof is a constellation of settlements numbering about 3,000 people, spread over four continents, with roots in Anabaptism — a 16th-century radical offshoot of Protestantism that believes in a separation of church and state and adult baptism, among other reforms. Members are pacifists who renounce private property, live simply, dress modestly and — to judge by the official Bruderhof website — have a distinctive sense of humor. (Among the questions in the site’s FAQ section: Sorry, what’s Anabaptism? and Do you ever have fun at the Bruderhof?) ‘‘Amish-adjacent’’ is probably the easiest way to describe them, but they’re allowed to have smartphones, drive cars and upload (utterly delightful!) YouTube videos.

At some point in my friend’s residence, a pregnant couple from the community went to an outside hospital to give birth. The baby was stillborn. Instead of the planned celebration, a course of mourning began. The day after the couple returned, a busload of men and women from a neighboring settlement showed up to take over daily operations. For 10 days this fleet of visitors cooked, cleaned and performed whatever tasks needed doing while the home community paused. ‘‘It felt like something from ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ’’ my friend told me. ‘‘All of a sudden this ancillary battalion shows up over the hill, and you feel like you might win the battle.’’ I can’t claim to understand the exact meaning of this protocol, but it makes sense on its face. A grieving period is marked by altering outer reality to mimic the state of the bereaved’s inner world: absolute inertia, total cessation of routine. The ratification might not be curative, but at least it would feel cosmically sensical.

The philosophical underpinning of this process is something the Bruderhof calls gelassenheit, and like a lot of ultimately untranslatable German words, the meaning has been extensively discussed, debated and written about on the internet. (The Anabaptist blogging community is surprisingly robust.) Yielding, waiting, submitting to God, abandoning the self, surrendering pride, subordinating the individual to the community — this is the English word cloud around gelassenheit. One blogger described it as ‘‘an antidote to the sheer pompous weariness of the world,’’ which sounds about right.

There is an argument that behaving unusually is a rational way to assimilate an altered reality, especially if the alteration is a rotten one. When you pre-emptively dismiss whatever rules of living are within your control, like using furniture or wearing clothes, you’re injecting yourself with a tolerable portion of insanity, which works like a vaccine. I’m childless, but I’ve watched friends who are isolating with children slip immediately into a less-extreme version of the same state: losing their grip, abandoning their routines, witnessing their selves mutate. If you believe that identity is behavior — that you are how you act, not what you think or how you feel — then you understand that adjectives like ‘‘normal’’ or ‘‘functional’’ require constant tending. If you change your conduct, you can change your life: how simple, and how daunting! All it took for me to become unrecognizable was to start acting like a different person. In theory, this should work in reverse too. When this is all over, I can return to chairs and forks and sleep. It would probably be for the best. In the meantime, there are plenty of individuals who haven’t spiraled, either because they don’t have the luxury or do have a stronger constitution. In these people I find an inspiring path back to normalcy.

Next to the house where I’m staying is a road that cuts through a marsh to a bunch of dumpsters, and I spend hours shuffling between the house and the dumpsters. It would be more pleasant to walk literally anywhere else, but I need to be within sprinting distance of home in case the anxiety takes a stomach-related expression. It doesn’t help that the marsh smells powerfully of sulfur. It’s like a Gary Larson sketch of hell. During one of my customary shuffles between home and dumpsters I looked up and saw, on the embankment opposite the fetid marsh, a guy in work boots with his hands on his hips, gazing down at me. I lurched to a halt, embarrassed to be caught scurrying back and forth like a creepy little rodent. He lifted a hand and waved.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Molly Young is a contributing writer for the magazine and the literary critic for New York magazine. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

I’ve always hated staying still. I was the child who fidgeted, the student who couldn’t concentrate, who would find any excuse to leave her desk and wander the streets, not to go shopping, or to meet friends, but simply to keep moving as a way to escape anxiety. It’s a tactic that has worked for me for many years, but now, like millions of others, I have to remain within the walls of my home. This confinement is a challenge for me, one so absurdly unimportant in the face of the current crisis that I’m uncomfortable even speaking of it. But it’s a difficulty all the same.

Recently I fired up a very old computer, a heavy, slow beast that still has within it all the research files I was working on nearly two decades ago. I was searching for a series of photographs I took in an Oxford library. Here they are. The patterns on the underside of soaring buzzard wings drawn in pencil upon a flattened cigarette pack. Photographs, letters. A hand-drawn map of Oflag VIIB, the prisoner-of-war camp in Eichstätt, Bavaria, where the German Army held Allied officers from 1940 to 1945, and pages and pages of notebooks written by prisoners who spent their days in this camp, and others, recording the lives of birds that nested there.

In Britain, comparisons to the Second World War have become a refrain of the Covid-19 crisis. Myriad political commentators have praised that era’s heroism, the ability of the British people to cope with discomfort and hardship. They use the war to encourage us to approach the pandemic with poise and equanimity. Such exhortations traduce the terrible realities of that war, and tend to flatten the worst aspects of this crisis too, and this is why I’m hesitant to draw any parallels between the lives of young men confined in a prison camp and the minor inconveniences of lockdown. But something about the present circumstances made me remember those men and want to revisit the notes they took.

They wrote about arriving in the camp and deciding it was paradise for a bird-watcher. Of how they watched for hours at a time, alone or in shifts — teams of men whose attention was fixed on the goldfinches that nested within the wire fences, on redstarts and wrynecks or warblers or crows — taking exactingly detailed notes of what those birds were doing every second of their witnessed lives. One watcher, Peter Conder, who later became the director of Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, eventually escaped captivity carrying his precious notes in a rucksack fashioned from an old shirt. These men told themselves that their notes would be of scientific importance once the war was over, but I don’t think that’s why they made their rigorous observations. I think doing so brought them comfort; the birds they watched were free and knew nothing of war, and they were the same kinds they knew from home. But mostly watching the birds was a way of mobilizing attention, to turn it into a means of imaginative escape, a way to counter their own sense of captivity, of powerlessness, futility and despair.

Over the last weeks, I’ve often seen it suggested in the press and social media that spending time in the natural world can bring comfort and consolation during the pandemic. It’s a notion rich with privilege, for Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting communities with little financial capital living in urban environments, for whom access to acres of forests or fields is difficult or impossible. But as these notebooks show, there are small, local methods of regarding the natural world that are available to anyone and can lessen the psychological burden of adversity.

During lockdown I have been spending a considerable amount of time watching the common birds that visit my small backyard. There are pigeons, starlings, blackbirds collecting beakfuls of dried grass to line their nests, sparrows taking dust baths in a patch of bare and sunlit earth. Watching animals from your home — and they can be anything from sparrows to spiders on windowsills — can give solace through the shift in perspective that the writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch called ‘‘unselfing.’’ In her book ‘‘The Sovereignty of Good,’’ she gave the example of how, when feeling anxious and resentful and caught up in your own concerns, you might look out of the window and see a hovering kestrel; stare at it — and then the world becomes all kestrel, just for a while. Your brooding self disappears, and when you return to yourself, your mental suffering has been lessened.

Most of us expect our lives to have familiar trajectories and spend our days secure in our assumptions about how things will go and what will happen next. Covid-19 has many terrible effects, but one that is particularly quiet and strange is how it has unmoored us from that familiar expectation. Everything is on hold. The future is indeterminate. We do not know what will happen next. We cannot. The sparrows that hop on the bricks of my backyard wall have daily routines I am coming to know, and witnessing them is calming to watch when I have few of my own. As I look out of my window in lockdown, my attention is fixed on these birds, rather than trees or distant rooftops, because I am desperate for novelty, to watch things that alter; for in seeing change, I can parse time.

While the prison-camp ornithologists took their notes, their lives were being controlled by camp administrators and guards, their futures dictated by the frighteningly unknowable progression of the war. They were crammed into close quarters, fed noisome rations, trapped in a situation in which they had no control over what would happen to them. But they could observe. ‘‘I used to watch this pair of goldfinches for 10 hours a day,’’ Peter Conder wrote, ‘‘and sometimes up to 13 hours, with only a minute or two for breaks.’’ The simple act of watching the birds could lessen the grip of dismal circumstances upon these men. But by making their careful notes, they did something more: grant themselves a new sense of control. Like his fellow bird-minded internees, Conder wrote down everything the birds did, every visit they made to the nest, every song, every flight to and from nearby trees, every hop and scratch and turn. These men were writing trajectories, borrowed from the lives of birds, that made the passing of time meaningful. Trajectories that ran backward rather than forward, but were reassuringly solid and sustained all the same.

The word ‘‘observation’’ comes from the Latin observatio, and its etymological history spans acts of both observation and observance. As I read these prison-camp notebooks, I began to see that what these men did was a form of devotion. They were using the small lives of birds as things they could orient themselves against. Their patient observations remind me of how monks in medieval monasteries ordered their days to fill them with meaning. How they made careful notes of the weather, of the changing pattern of the stars, and how they timed their prayers according to the precise positions of celestial objects. I never thought that I could be content to stay still, but I remember those monks, look at the notes taken by the men watching small birds behind the wire, and think, too, of Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s book ‘‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating,’’ the story of how, confined to bed for many months by a debilitating mitochondrial disease, she made careful observations of a tiny snail that had been brought in from outside in a pot of violets, transforming what she saw into a rich meditation on snails and time and habitation and purpose at a time when all other life was out of reach. What she came to understand during that time is something I have been late in learning. We don’t need to strike out into the wild to feel close to the natural world and receive benison from it. From one place, we can witness the sweep and dip of the universe about us. The stars over the monastery gables, the birds on the wire, the street pigeons that visit the patch of grass behind my house before flying off elsewhere. We can become deeply connected to the world through paying the most careful and fearless attention to what we can see, from wherever it is we must be.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Helen Macdonald is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the best-selling memoir “H Is for Hawk.” She last wrote for the magazine about Brexit and the ancient British ritual of swan upping. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

In his 1943 book, ‘‘Liberté, liberté chérie,’’ Pierre Mendès-France recounts the various waves of flight that marked the exodus from Paris in the spring of 1940, at the dawn of the German occupation. ‘‘In the early days, we saw fast and sumptuous American cars driven by liveried chauffeurs,’’ he writes. These were followed by the ‘‘less shiny, less new’’ vehicles of the middle classes, which were in turn followed days later by caravans of jalopies, eventually abandoned by the roadside, ‘‘their owners continuing on foot to the next town, then by train, bicycle, or hitchhiking.’’ Next came the cyclists — ‘‘mostly young, often carefree’’ — then the pedestrians, ‘‘sometimes whole families, the man with a rucksack on his shoulder, the woman pushing a cart or baby carriage.’’ Later came the stragglers, ‘‘overwhelmed, feet bloodied.’’ Finally, there were the horse-drawn carriages driven by peasants, ‘‘laden with sick people, children, old people, agricultural equipment and furniture,’’ he writes. ‘‘Sometimes livestock walked alongside them, including cows and horses.’’

Plus ça change. It wasn’t nearly so frenetic, but on March 16 my wife and I, along with our two small children and whatever clothes, books and toys we could think to grab, ordered a taxi across an empty Paris and joined a crush of masked travelers at the Gare Montparnasse. As we idled under the LCD screens, waiting anxiously for the arrival of the trains that would shoot out of the station to various destinations along the country’s western reaches, I was aware that we were all of us re-enacting a scene that has played out over and over again throughout this city’s dramatic history.

The day we left, after a week of growing alarm over the spread of the novel coronavirus and decreasing freedom in the attempt to limit the contagion, starting with the closure of schools and swiftly followed by the shuttering of all nonessential businesses, President Emmanuel Macron was scheduled to address the nation in the evening. He would, as many expected, soon order total home confinement. The only question for anyone with options was where to go to endure it. We barely had a chance to contemplate our decision.

The day before we ended up leaving, it was our stroke of good fortune to be having lunch with a couple who have their own young children and an acquaintance in government kind enough to give them advance warning. These friends patiently impressed upon us the severity of what was about to happen. We were going to be housebound for the next 15 days, very likely longer. Our friends would be leaving in a few hours for their family home near the Atlantic. Would we like to hunker down with them? At least this way the kids would have a yard to expand into. Once the order was made official, it would be much more difficult to move around the country. I grabbed my friend’s laptop and reserved what appeared to be four of the last tickets available to La Baule-Escoublac before confinement, departing the following morning.

Our decision was a common one. Le Parisien reported that ‘‘more than a million residents left the Paris region before confinement,’’ based on geolocation data collected by Orange, the country’s largest mobile-phone service provider. The company’s chief executive estimated that from March 13 to March 20, a staggering 17 percent of the population of Paris and its neighboring suburbs decamped to their country houses, of which there exist some 3.4 million around the nation.

Contemplating these figures and their implications, I was reminded of the architectural historian James S. Ackerman’s 1990 classic, ‘‘The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses,’’ and its famous description of the significance of the secondary residence in an urbanized society. Noting that the ‘‘basic program of the villa’’ has remained unchanged since Roman times, Ackerman offers an explanation: ‘‘It fills a need that never alters, a need which, because it is not material but psychological and ideological, is not subject to the influences of evolving societies and technologies. The villa accommodates a fantasy which is impervious to reality.’’ And though it exists as a respite from the city, the villa ‘‘cannot be understood apart from the city’’ — its meaning derives from what it is not.

Few, if any, European societies are as centralized as France. Almost a full fifth of the French population lives in the Paris metropolitan area. In terms of cultural and economic dominance, Paris, still Europe’s fashion capital, also combines the functions and prestige of Wall Street, Hollywood and Washington — all in one location. Despite various attempts over the years to decentralize the state, the inhabitants of the city lord over the rest of France to an extent that is similar but distinct from the divide between ‘‘real’’ America and its coastal elite. Despite extravagantly rich and diverse geographical blessings, from snow-capped Alpine slopes to crystalline Mediterranean shores and the exquisite soils of Champagne and Bordeaux, since monarchical times, the country has principally understood itself along a simple binary: Paris/province. Recently, such cultural and political insolubility has provoked serious societal consequences. First came more than a solid year of Yellow Vest protests and riots, which, in Paris, sometimes had the feel of a furious guerrilla war being waged on the town by the country. Now we have Covid-19, and though France provides a safety net that precludes the spectacular kind of degradation and suffering currently on display in America, few seem to believe that we’re truly all in this together.

On top of it all — or as a fundamental aspect of this imbalanced relationship — there is that unusually high proportion of second-home ownership (even if it’s worth noting that these homes, while lovely, are typically modest). In times of crisis, whether man-made or the result of the pestilent ‘‘flail of God,’’ as Camus so memorably phrased it, Parisians who can are wont to chase their safety to the provinces. Fleeing Paris is a collective, inherited reflex. And as Mendès-France’s account lays bare, whatever else they are, such stories of escape are always accounts of privilege — with regard to the position of the capital in relation to the rest of the country, as well as the internal hierarchy of its inhabitants.

As a parisien d’adoption, I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric. As a foreigner compelled by an epidemic to abandon my home — an exile twice over — it is difficult, if necessary, for me to think of myself as part of this other, overarching dynamic. Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American. But now it’s different. My family has inadvertently participated in a larger, possibly exploitative interaction that has sown resentment among some residents of the rural areas we have infiltrated. The locals we’ve met have been mostly welcoming and generous, though it’s hard to say to what degree that’s because the fear that Parisians would spread the virus ultimately proved unfounded. In those infrequent but memorable instances in which a neighbor declines a ‘‘bonjour,’’ and for the first time I can remember, I think I do detect my wife and friends being perceived the way that I can be viewed — not as natives but as interlopers in this land.

La Baule-Escoublac, the nearby seaside resort we had come through from Paris, counted 10 refugees for every inhabitant during the last mass exodus 80 years ago. As fearsome as Covid-19 is, it is not the Nazis. Still, the mayor of La Baule, Yves Métaireau, estimated that the population had swelled to more than 40,000 inhabitants from 17,000. After nearly a decade of expatriate ambivalence, imagining myself not so much a resident of France as a ‘‘trans-Atlantic commuter,’’ to use James Baldwin’s phrase — with one foot in this society and one foot out — in exercising this authentically Parisian need to escape, it feels as though, suddenly, I’ve had my position here solidified. Mandatory confinement is scheduled to expire on May 11, but neither my wife nor I is so inclined to return to the city right away. We take turns scouring the internet for houses in the country to rent — a thoroughly Parisian activity these days. The pandemic is forcing more and more of us to reconsider just where we belong.

On a recent afternoon, as my friend and I were waiting a safe distance behind the next person in line to enter the new organic market and scrolling through work emails, he looked up suddenly and remarked that this time away had put a few things in perspective: Maybe it wasn’t all that necessary to live in Paris after all. We’d already laughed at the fact that we’d gotten in the habit of spotting and mentally separating ourselves from the conspicuous new arrivals who flooded the area over the Easter break. A monthlong string of sun-drenched days was still going strong, and at that moment, I tended to agree with him. I wondered how many of the million-plus Parisians scattered around the country were thinking the same thing.

Correction: May 21, 2020

An earlier version of this article misstated the date of Pierre Mendès France's book “Liberté, liberté chérie.” It was published in 1943, not 1977.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a contributing writer for the magazine and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. His last feature was about the director Jacques Audiard. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

Like so many quarantines, mine began with a series of sudden subtractions: subways, classes, public spaces, hugs, bookstores, child care; the bodies of friends in my living room; the bodies of strangers brushing against mine on the sidewalk; and finally my own body, as the virus came for me early, insistent but ultimately merciful; shivers and night sweats and muscle aches rippling from my neck to my heels. During those weeks of total isolation with my toddler, I lost my sense of taste and smell, lost everything beyond my doorway — lost the streets of my city, which was rapidly flooding with deeper losses I could only imagine. The wailing sirens made it impossible to forget that the hospitals were filling with patients on ventilators.

The subtractions of our quarantine came on the heels of other ones. I signed divorce papers just a month before the city started shutting down, and as the lockdown’s restrictions drew an increasingly tight perimeter around every household, they cast into sharper relief the ways mine had been gutted. It felt vaguely like being forced to live in a building splintered by a wrecking ball before the rebuilding had begun. Quarantine didn’t just take things away; it revealed — with a harsh, unrelenting clarity — what had already been lost.

Once I realized I would be spending many weeks alone at home with my daughter, I made us a daily schedule with clumsy illustrations: stray water drops next to ‘‘Mama Shower,’’ a cutout octopus next to ‘‘Cleaning/Chores,’’ as if we’d deploy eight arms to wipe the door handles with bleach; a tiger beside our ‘‘Morning Walk,’’ as if the streets of Brooklyn would be full of exotic discoveries. But once I got sick, even the limited life outlined on our rainbow schedule — its cheerful colors radiating compensatory, forced optimism — now seemed naïve in its aspirations, anchored by walks we could no longer take, meals I could no longer taste and activities that required staying vertical longer than I could manage. The cherry blossoms beyond our windows seemed tone-deaf in their extravagance. The sunshine arrived like someone laughing on a hospital ward.

Before I realized I was sick, I refused to believe my own fatigue, falling asleep on the couch while I tried to return work email during naptime. But eventually there was no denying it: the aches running like electric currents through my legs, wearing me out like exercise. When I stood after picking up things my daughter dropped or tossed, the corners of my vision fluttered with dark flecks. The virus claimed my bedroom as its own, salting my sheets with night sweat. When I woke in the darkness, body aching in the gloom, I always checked the news on my phone before I could remember not to.

A few days after I lost my sense of taste and smell, I started seeing articles about this new symptom. That’s how it was: bodies in the news, and the news in our bodies, making us sweat and shiver. It seemed as if losing my sense of taste was a personalized cosmic joke, a nod to the eating disorder I had years earlier. But that’s the fallacy and hubris of any misfortune, however minor — that it was made bespoke, just for us. I knew this was melodrama and tried not to indulge it before naptime. Then I could cry alone in the bathroom if I needed to.

Maybe the pandemic felt to everyone like a heat-seeking missile specifically targeting the particular fragilities of any life — a new business, a restaurant job, a fractured marriage or its dissolution — even as the virus cast its vast, impersonal damage across us all. It created a certain cognitive dissonance to encounter something as surreal and unfamiliar as a global pandemic from inside the deadening familiarity and cloistered banality of our apartment — an extraordinary event experienced from inside a parade of days textured by unceasing ordinariness, the daily loop of domesticity. The teakettle, the oatmeal-crusted bowls in the sink, the toddler scattering her tiny hats and gloves across the floor for the umpteenth time, ‘‘Mama FIX it.’’ The days were endless and also irrelevant: Tuesdays were Wednesdays were Fridays, except sometimes it was raining outside and sometimes it was sunny and sometimes — as a neighbor informed us by text — someone broke into the vestibule of our building to ransack the Amazon packages. The past flooded the empty present, filling the apartment with its ghosts.

I kept remembering the summer I spent recovering from jaw surgery two decades earlier, not just sequestered in my home but in my body; unable to eat or speak because my jaw was wired shut for months, 18 years old and missing the world that was stripped away. I kept remembering the first time I tried to stop drinking — at 27, a decade later — when I essentially put myself in quarantine, taking a week off my bakery job to hole up in my brother’s empty apartment and Not Drink. In my mind, this self-sequestering was a cross between a bad schoolgirl’s being sent to a corner of the classroom and a hero’s striding off to some remote mountaintop to confront her archenemy in one-on-one combat. In reality, it mainly involved eating saltines and foil-wrapped triangles of spreadable cheese for dinner, and realizing — at one point — that it had been a couple of days since I’d been outside, in part because I was afraid I lacked the willpower not to stop at a liquor store. I drank again as soon as I got home.

When I tried to quit again, a few months later, it was not in isolation but by flinging myself into the unexpected community of recovery meetings. Remembering those nights in the midst of the pandemic, I yearned for their physicality: the unfolded origami creases of strangers’ papery palms against my own; the stem of a plastic fork still warm from someone else’s grip as I pronged a vanilla-frosted slice of sober-anniversary cake; the raspy voices and minty gum-breath of chain-smokers offering collective prayers. But after six weeks of studiously avoiding any kind of contact or even proximity with strangers, I also flinched at the idea of that kind of bodily communion; it seemed an impossibly beautiful constellation of perilous exposures.

But while the physical proximity of early sobriety felt impossibly far away, an echo from those days felt eerily close — the surprise of finding unexpected abundance inside a state of loss. When you lose what you rely upon, you start reaching for things you never thought you’d want, or else the things you already had but always took for granted. Early sobriety taught me one version of this strange arithmetic by giving me a way to understand what I was losing — the sweet oblivion of getting drunk — in terms of what it made room for: not just the sweaty palms and earnest confessions of strangers but also a more acute presence in my own life.

At first, of course, not-drinking was hell. It was deprivation and punishment, as if I were trapped in a bare white room while the cinema reels of boozy nostalgia played on the other side of a glass wall: the salty pop of gin-soaked olives, the foam of cold beer on warm summer evenings flickering with fireflies. All that was gone. Only seltzer remained. But if not-drinking was hell, then sobriety was something else. Eventually — not on the first day, or the 20th, but maybe on the 100th, or the 400th — the whole world began to open up. Days weren’t just defined by absence — this is life minus drinking — but by a new kind of plenitude: the rituals of recovery meetings, and the voices of strangers in those rooms, telling stories about loving booze so much they thought their hearts would break from losing it.

This strange, unsettling affinity with strangers was abundance. The call to listen was abundance. But these weren’t the only forms of abundance. The sensory hyperattention of sobriety was overwhelming, like staring at the sun: the acid pang of an orange slice on a cold sore, the ache in the balls of my feet after 12 hours standing beside a giant mixer in the kitchen of the bakery where I worked. The abundance of those days rose from the conspiracy of multiple constraints — the constraints of sobriety alongside the confines of that cramped kitchen and those repetitive labors. Even unbeautiful things came to constitute a strange new lushness, because they felt so ferociously proximate, so searing and undeniable.

A decade later, quarantine was nothing if not searing and undeniable — the broken-record quality of our daily lives insisting on the same rooms, the same people, the same routines. Recovery meetings happened on Zoom now, like so much of the rest of my life, and at a distance couldn’t offer the same bodily surrender. Still, while certain kinds of visceral intimacy were lost, in other ways the meetings felt more intimate than ever. Every square on the screen was a portal into someone’s home, revealing other sober alcoholics leaning against their headboards or curled up under blankets, Bluetooth buds carrying the rest of our voices, cat whiskers swishing suddenly in front of computer cameras. In our thumbnail boxes, we chanted the serenity prayer in an out-of-sync patchwork that was somehow more moving for its raggedness, for the ways it failed to disguise the incompleteness of our medium, the ways it didn’t replace what we’d lost: that room full of body heat and layer cake, plastic forks passed palm to palm. It was a chorus of disembodied voices trying our best, straining or fumbling or sometimes surging toward gratitude; acknowledging all the loss and terror around us without trying to redeem it.

For the first few meetings I attended, I had Zoom set to ‘‘speaker’’ mode because I didn’t know there was a ‘‘gallery’’ alternative that could display everyone’s faces at once. Whoever was speaking loomed large, but whenever someone laughed or murmured in recognition their face would pop briefly to the center of the screen — the technology illuminating, just for a moment, the flashes of resonance that had animated our meetings all along. Sometimes I’d be distracted or horrified by the sight of my own face in the corner — wondering if my expression communicated enough attention, compassion or openhearted presence — but one of the best things about speaker mode was that it let me scroll away from my own face so I didn’t see it at all. Scrolling away from my own face on Zoom became a technological embodiment of what recovery meetings had been inviting me to do for years: get away from myself, flee the quarantine of my own heart.

Even outside these meetings, quarantine was enacting a daily alchemy with the abstract truisms of recovery, making them concrete: One day at a time meant not knowing how long quarantine would last. It meant: Just get through this single stretch of hours. Surrender existed on all scales. It meant giving up on knowing how the pandemic would play out across the world. It meant giving up a definite timeline for when we’d come out of lockdown. It meant letting my daughter pull all the books off the bookshelf without trying to pick them up. One morning I sat cross-legged and tried to read passages from a book of Buddhist meditations — holding on to anything blocks wisdom, I dutifully repeated — while my daughter climbed onto my back, heaving oatmeal breath on my cheek, and pulled the book from my hands. She enacted its truth by ripping one of its pages.

Ten days into our total isolation, once our apartment had filled with bags of recycling, I Googled ‘‘toddler art + old trash.’’ We ended up drawing a road on the back of a cardboard diaper box. When she ripped up one of her picture books, we used the illustrations as decoration, and I copied a quote onto the cardboard from a poem Sylvia Plath had written for her newborn son, a poem I memorized at 24 during the months after my abortion: ‘‘Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses. . . . ’’ Old trash was the new cross-stitch. My daughter scribbled over the lines with marker, and they felt even truer obscured by her scribbles, spackled with her fish stickers.

Every morning I read the same passage in the Big Book, It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness, and thought of other people’s quarantines — people with partners, who curled up with a body each night, or people who’d fled the city, or people who’d fled the city with their partners — and tried to surrender that resentment too. I tried to neutralize it with gratitude. Not gratitude in the dutiful, box-checking, white-knuckled sense of acknowledging everything I had — my health, my daughter, my job — but in a more immediate sense: for the sunlight on my daughter’s overgrown curls, for the specific weight of her head on my shoulder; for my students reading from the pandemic diaries I’d asked them to keep, as we all gathered in our Zoom boxes to listen; for my high school friends on Zoom, how blunt and broken I could be in their company. I was grateful for the taste of peanut butter, the first time it returned — the first time any taste returned. The faint nutty sweetness was like a stranger standing at the end of a long corridor, barely visible but there — more than six feet away, but better than no one at all.

During the thickest, shivery days of my illness — when it was just me and my daughter and a photo-copy of my divorce settlement on a closet shelf, tucked beneath our stash of cloth masks — it was as if her tiny, restless body were living for both of us: tasting for us both, seeking pleasure for us both, radiating energy for us both. She conducted intense, inscrutable projects, using her tiny wok to carry my lucky hawk’s feather — found by the side of the road on a sunny day upstate, in another universe entirely — to her little wooden kitchen, where she stirred it with a little wooden knife. What was she doing? Her eyes gleamed with focus. She wanted to take care of everything. She tried to put a diaper on her wooden zebra. She tried to put a diaper on our Dustbuster. She tried to put a diaper on our tube of Clorox wipes and then tuck it under my comforter. ‘‘Night, night,’’ she said. On Day 8 of our isolation, she glanced toward the window and said plaintively, ‘‘Outside.’’ On Day 9, we spotted a toddler in a puffy orange coat lurching toward her father on a driveway across the street, and my daughter called out: ‘‘Orange baby!’’ Seeing another person felt like spotting a celebrity. When the toddler left, my daughter called out: ‘‘Orange baby come back!’’

When my aching muscles felt like knotted ropes draped across the inside of my body, and I felt incapable of doing much besides lying down, I was grateful for my daughter’s endless appetite for stories. Her desire to read 20 picture books in a row no longer seemed burdensome, as it did during the busy crush of normal life; now it seemed more like a way she was guiding us through the hours. The days were a swirl of body chills and fantasies: the story about the boy and bear traveling through a magical land of berries; the story about the mouse who recited poems to all the other mice spending winter huddled in an old stone wall; the story about the woman who gazed out the window from her sick bed and imagined planting lupines across the hills; the story about the dinosaur who wanted to be a ballerina. It started to seem as if every story were about quarantine. The mice in the old stone wall were in quarantine. The woman in her sickbed was in quarantine. The brontosaurus bumping her head while attempting a jeté was in her own quarantine — trapped in a space that was too confined, a world that was too small. The boy and the bear on the blackberry train were clearly also in quarantine; that’s why they were dreaming of this fantastical land full of strawberry ponies and raspberry fireworks.

At dusk each day, I played Leonard Cohen during bath-time, his scratchy voice crooning about a Manhattan that no longer existed, and might never exist again, where there’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening. My daughter’s tiny palms splashed against the soapy water as the streets below our window erupted into applause for the doctors and nurses at the hospital a few blocks away — and we clapped too, through the suds of her bath, though no one could hear us.

I tried to feed my daughter at least one new thing each day, as a way of telling the days apart. Boiled zucchini, sliced rings of pineapple, raspberries before they fuzzed with tiny white beards of mold. Pasta shaped like bow ties, pasta shaped like wagon wheels. Peanut butter straight from the jar. Sometimes I caught myself gazing at her with jealousy — she could still taste. I missed the taste of chocolate, the taste of apples, the taste of Cheddar cheese, even the taste of the instant coffee I drank when the good coffee ran out. Or certain smells, like the urine tang and compost stink of my daughter’s drooping diapers — I grew to miss even that.

Missing taste became a way of missing everything. I missed the air, missed having moments when I was doing something other than picking tiny wooden teacups off the floor, missed other people — even a single other person, even the bodies of strangers — missed my friend Anna, who lived five blocks away, now a thousand miles, who brought over groceries when I was sick: a bulb of fennel and a carton of mushrooms and pale balls of raw cookie dough, grub worms of knobby turmeric (what do I . . . ?). Late at night, after our kids were asleep, Anna and I would trade voice memos telling the stories of objects in our homes, because the objects in our homes were what we had. She told me about her stack of overdue library books, the orange earrings she’d given birth in. It wasn’t the same as feeling her arm draped over my shoulders, or watching our toddlers gazing up at us, side by side, waiting for us to feed them chunks of apple-cider doughnuts. But it was something that reached into my marrow, her voice traveling across the city blocks, filling up the darkness.

A few years into sobriety, I went to a potluck where no one ate or drank anything. Half of the people who came were alcoholic, or sober addicts, and the other half struggled with binge eating, so the idea was basically: What activity can we gather around that doesn’t involve putting something into our bodies? Everyone brought something to read, and we gathered over flickering candles and listened to one another as if our voices were food. A few days into the quarantine, when two friends organized a group of us to read poems aloud and send the audio files to one another, I thought of that boozeless, foodless potluck, how grace never arrives as we imagine it. I sat by a window overlooking empty streets, as my daughter tried to put a wooden cookie in my mouth, and listened to the disembodied voice of my friend reading William Meredith’s ‘‘Accidents of Birth’’: ‘‘to/meet in a room, alive in our skins,/and the whole galaxy gaping there.’’

What to do with the strange incandescence of those two weeks of total isolation with my daughter — her sweet voice naming all the animals in her bath book as the clapping from the streets rose around us like a hymn? What to do with the eerie, spellbinding video my friend sent of herself dancing in the middle of a deserted street to a speaker blaring ‘‘We Are the World’’ from a shuttered jewelry store? These strange beauties did nothing to supply the ventilators our city lacked, to mitigate the oncoming apex of deaths, to stave off the bankruptcies or the oncoming recession. They were not a vaccine, or an antibody test, or even a useless floating hospital docked in the Hudson River. They did not cure the virus, or redeem the suffering it caused. The sirens kept blaring as I gave my daughter her baths.

It’s easy to subscribe to a fantasy of diminishment as revelation — the notion that wisdom is the inevitable yield of hardship. But sometimes loss just feels like loss, and absence is just absence: the solipsism of pain; the ache of losing touch; the empty streets and bankruptcies, the missing ventilators, the bodies stored in the temporary morgues of moving vans. The trick is how to hold both truths at once — absence-as-presence and absence-as-absence — rather than letting one obscure the other; how to let fragile, unexpected, imperfect consolations exist alongside everything they can’t console.

Holding both at once lets us honor the pleasures and odd discoveries of quarantine without blinding ourselves to everything beyond it. It’s a way of seeing that does not back away from what is happening by pretending people are not dying, and that does not back away from what is happening by pretending people are not loving and being loved alongside this death. Because we are also eating brownies. We are stupefied by the tenderness of a child tucking a tube of Clorox wipes under the covers. We are brought to tears by the sight of a nurse walking home from work in hospital scrubs. Suffering and grace live side by side, as they always have — in the same homes, or else separated by those walls we keep between our bodies now, in service of a solidarity we trust but cannot touch. Grace locks eyes with pain from the other side of the sidewalk, six feet away, and they both keep walking.

Leslie Jamison is the author, most recently, of “Make It Scream, Make It Burn.” She last wrote for the magazine about the relationship between creativity and addiction. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

Shortly after the coronavirus crisis set in, my friend Caroline Campbell, a curator at London’s National Gallery, wrote to tell me about how, a couple of days after the museum was forced to close its doors to the public, she found herself wandering through the empty galleries. She had never known the place to be so quiet nor the birdsong outside so loud. ‘‘The blinds and shutters were down,’’ she wrote. ‘‘The pictures hung on the walls in heavy silence.’’ But what unsettled her most was how the new atmosphere seemed to alter her relationship to the pictures. ‘‘On this oddest of days,’’ she said, ‘‘I was drawn to a picture that has never interested me greatly. I know Gainsborough’s portrait of his two daughters chasing a butterfly means a lot to many people, but it hasn’t done much for me in the past. It has always seemed schmaltzy and sentimental. But now I was utterly compelled by it.’’

Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘‘The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly,’’ from about 1756, is a popular picture, one of those that are easy to dismiss. ‘‘I began to think,’’ Caroline wrote, ‘‘that our past life has maybe been as futile as chasing butterflies. I also felt, in a weird way, that Gainsborough’s children were trapped, stuck within a frame on the wall of the gallery, and only our gaze could set them free. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that pictures only function when there are people to look at them. Otherwise, they hang somewhere in limbo, purposeless and a little lost.’’

Like Caroline, I had never paid much attention to ‘‘The Painter’s Daughters.’’ I have many times passed it by on my way to another picture. I looked it up online. There is a strange and wary confidence to the sisters. The butterfly is precarious, pushed close to the edge of the painting, and seems to be both free and in mortal danger. The sisters are holding hands but are far apart enough that they seem connected yet distinct. It is not clear if the older one is readying herself to strike. In any event, she knows more than the other and is, at the moment we catch them, willing to let her younger sister test the limits a little. Theirs is the murderous curiosity of the innocent. The butterfly is balanced on what looks like a thorny stalk. The little sister’s hand is already extended halfway there. Her delicate fingers are dark with intent. If she misses, though, the thorns will be what she catches. Her face is ignorant of this. The older sister, however, has an inkling and seems to be both encouraging and restraining her sister. Part of her purpose seems to be her own amusement. And suddenly, looking at them together — the shapes of their figures, the activity of their dresses — they resemble the wings of a large butterfly in motion. All around them is darkness. The trees are pregnant with dark premonitions, and the small light in the distant sky is weak and dying.

“The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly” by Thomas GainsboroughNational Gallery, London/ Art Resource, NY

It is a painting about the turning of time, about youth and aging, about the violence of the innocent and about a father’s concern, his fears of mysterious and real dangers.

“With My Head Hanging Down Before the Parachute Opened,’’ by Willi RugeWilli Ruge/Ullstein Bild, via Getty Images

In the days after my exchange with Caroline, further restrictions were imposed. I began to miss my old routine. For a majority of my life, I have visited the museum about once a week to stand in front of a picture for half an hour or so. In London, where I live for most of the year, I usually go to the National Gallery; in New York, where I live for the rest of the time, it is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Without knowing it, I have, in modest ways, come to organize my week around this habit. But this, of course, was the least of it; the coronavirus has so quickly succeeded in affecting almost every aspect of life. It has encouraged us to be suspicious of one another. It has exposed the inequities in our society. Its effects are mental as well as physical, in the sense that it threatens to attack that most essential of human rights, breathing, and compel our culture to think that the pandemic is the only thing worth thinking about. As you would under a dictatorship, you must protect your body as well as your imagination from it. I declined invitations to write about it and tried instead to focus on my work. I felt I was turning upon myself. Time itself has come to resemble a loop.

Yet somehow, whenever I longed for a return to normality, to take the bus and visit the National Gallery, the most vivid image I had wasn’t from my memory. Instead, I saw myself in Caroline’s shoes, walking through the empty museum to look at the Gainsborough. It was as though, through a strange mental confluence, no doubt exaggerated by the situation we are all in, I had swapped places with Caroline. I thought of something she and I discussed before, in the days when we were able to meet in person, about how a painting is never finished, that it must continue to do its work long after it has been hung on the gallery wall, that a picture relies on us to complete it. This is why, we agreed passionately, free access to museums is essential. Our culture depends on it, but also the art depends on it. Now that this age-old communication was not possible, how can those paintings in the museum, hanging in the dark, function? The question presented itself with the nuts and bolts of a practical problem. When the art in the museum is inaccessible, what happens to it and what happens to us? Have we not observed how a picture can suddenly become significant to our culture while another, equally good, perhaps even better, recedes from our attention? And does this not prove that art is in constant dialogue with history?

It was in this state of mournful confusion that a set of photographs I saw years ago — and for all intents and purposes had forgotten about — emerged, like a found object, in my memory. In certain moments, usually when I wasn’t thinking, the images would occur to me. They are by a little-known German photographer named Willi Ruge (1892-1961). ‘‘I Photograph Myself During a Parachute Jump’’ is a series shot as Ruge dived off an aircraft headfirst, like a rocket to the ground. The pictures were taken in 1931, between the two mammoth wars, and therefore a time, I imagine, like those trees in Gainsborough’s painting, pregnant with dark premonitions.

Ruge was interested in speed. As a boy he wanted to be a pilot. He sharpened his photographic skills during World War I, when he served at the front and as an air gunner. It was then that the connection was reinforced in his mind between photography and danger. He later traveled to Argentina, where he photographed bodies mingled in tango and took several disturbing shots as he turned around the muscular tug and pull of a wild horse some gauchos had chained to a tree under the blazing midday sun in order to tame it. He took aerial views of trees, each standing beside its shadow, sparsely dotting a small village in Sudan. He captured, in startlingly perfect focus, a rider falling off his horse at a steeplechase race in 1920s England. He took a haunting portrait of a Royal Air Force pilot, Lt. Col. Frederick F. Minchin, a few months before he set off on an attempt to cross the Atlantic. The aircraft disappeared. The pilot’s fate remains a mystery. The photograph is uncanny because Minchin appears to be mesmerized, peering fixedly at something just out of reach, as though recognizing his destiny and yet unable to escape it. Ruge caught a similar entranced quality in Rudolf Caracciola, the top racing driver of the age. He captured speed-distorted images of him whizzing by in his car and took quieter photographs of his wife as she leaned over, watching her husband with trembling pride and fear in her face.

In 1936, well into the Nazi years, Ruge published a series he titled ‘‘In the Air With Our Combat Pilots,’’ which included photographs that lionized the German Air Force. A few years later, during World War II, he more nakedly used his camera as a tool for propaganda: He photographed military personnel in strategic meetings, captured machine gunners and pilots in action and documented the optimistic faces of young recruits. Ruge seemed to have accepted Nazi rule and certainly supported it with his work. He, like other German photographers then, commercially benefited from the exile, incarceration and murder of able colleagues. And therefore, his work after 1933 exists in a troubling vacuum, one marked by the enforced disappearance of others, and his work before that time is touched by a powerful foreboding, as though he sensed the nearness of the precipice and was darkly drawn to it.

One such example is ‘‘I Photograph Myself During a Parachute Jump.’’ Here Ruge becomes the protagonist of his own work. He wanted to capture the drama from several angles. He, the falling figure, had a camera; a colleague of his photographed from another aircraft that hovered at a similar altitude; and a second was on the ground and caught, as Ruge had done with the Caracciolas, Mrs. Ruge’s reaction as she watched her husband descend from the sky. In ‘‘Photo of Myself at the Moment of My Jump,’’ Ruge appears to be falling backward, his mouth wind-swollen and horribly open. In ‘‘I Decided to Jump Headfirst,’’ taken from the other aircraft, we see Ruge from a distance. He is upside down, and his arms and legs are spread wide as he swims in the air a few meters beneath his aircraft, the faraway earth flat and placid beneath. Then in ‘‘Meanwhile, on the Ground … ’’ we see his wife holding their newborn son and looking up at the sky, surrounded by other amazed onlookers; one of them, a lady in an open coat, is literally biting her fingers. A few seconds later, the panic has set in for Ruge. He takes a picture that he later calls ‘‘With My Head Hanging Down Before the Parachute Opened … .’’ It shows his face from beneath, his features distorted by fear and effort, and his right hand is reaching to clinch on to something. The gesture is uncannily reminiscent of Gainsborough’s younger daughter’s hand reaching for the butterfly.

In the same year that Ruge dived off the aircraft with a camera, Virginia Woolf wrote, in ‘‘A Letter to a Young Poet’’: ‘‘But it is October 1931, and for a long time now poetry has shirked contact with — what shall we call it? — Shall we shortly and no doubt inaccurately call it life? And will you come to my help by guessing what I mean?’’ It is a curious coincidence that just as Ruge was making ‘‘I Photograph Myself During a Parachute Jump,’’ which is, in part at least, about contact and lack of contact, Woolf was thinking of the same problem in language and, more specific, poetry’s ability to capture life in the modern age. ‘‘And will you come to my help by guessing what I mean?’’ is surely every work of art’s silent plea. Indeed, Ruge’s parachuting self does remind me of the poet that Woolf evokes in her ‘‘Letter,’’ dancing ‘‘on the floor of [his] mind.’’ Here are his feet, in lace-up leather shoes, dangling helplessly above a cityscape. The architecture, trees and road below seem like a distant dream, a child’s fantasy of what a city might look like. Like the rest of the photographs in this series, it is about proximity, but also approximation: how to measure the distance between two points, and what it is to cross it. They are about being suspended, and what that state might hold. They reveal a playful but also anxious response to our relationship to earth, our resistance to nature and the fantasy, which is also a madness, of wanting to be weaned from it.

I am still surprised that the work of Willi Ruge, which has never before seriously occupied my attention, should suddenly come so vividly to mind during these strange and uncertain days. Not only are we uncertain about how and when we will come out of this; we are also unsure about the world we will find on the other side. We feel oddly convinced that nothing will be the same. It is as if the present has woken us up from a dream. And yet, very much like the painter’s daughters and the falling Ruge, we feel that we are involved in some sort of experiment in living. The moment is charged with opposing temptations. Will we rethink our attitudes to nature and to commerce in order to address the health of our planet and the violent inequities in our society? Will we remember the compelling force with which we have been reminded of how deeply interconnected and reliant we are on one another? That we are not only part of nature but also part of a single organism? Will we honor the passion we felt for kindness? Will we, in other words, stay true to the version we glimpsed of our better selves: that of generosity, heroism and compassion? Or will we yield to the dark calls of those who insist that the lessons to take from this are that we should fear the stranger even more, build higher walls and practice a resolute policy of intolerance to difference and to reason? Our history shows that we are paradoxically good at learning from the past as well as remaining somewhat unchanged by it.

Perhaps Ruge’s images returned to me because, as with my friend Caroline, the current circumstances have altered my attention. I think this is one of the ways that art works; it is there for our pleasure but also as a tool for thinking. It helps us consider the present and our place in it. It is what has made Caroline stop at the Gainsborough, and it is also what has made me recall images by a largely forgotten photographer whose work I had seen only in passing several years ago and in reproduction. And from this perspective, it suddenly seems that ‘‘The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly’’ and ‘‘I Photograph Myself During a Parachute Jump’’ are connected. I think it was the wariness and suspended state of danger and threat in the Gainsborough that helped bring to mind Ruge’s photographs. Both are about a suspended moment, where the consequences are in question; a moment, in other words, not too dissimilar from where we find ourselves today.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Hisham Matar is the author of the novels “In the Country of Men” and “Anatomy of a Disappearance” and the memoirs “The Return” and “A Month in Siena.” He has won numerous prizes, including a Pulitzer. This is his first article for the magazine. Brian Rea is an illustrator in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

A few weeks ago, I dreamed that I was scrolling Twitter and came across a post that stopped my thumb cold: ‘‘CUOMO OPENS BRAIDING SALONS.’’ Dream me — hair loosened into its natural Afro, like real me — was relieved, elated. I read the series of tweets detailing all the precautions that salons and customers would be taking: wiping down chairs regularly, disinfecting combs, wearing masks. The tweets told me that I needed to be smart and stay cautious, but that the worst was over, cosmetologically speaking. After three months, one week and six days, I could call my braider, Sonia, once again and pay $150 for her to spend six to eight hours slowly yanking my hair into dozens of tidy, light braids, completed mostly during commercial breaks of talk shows, while I ran down my phone battery and balanced Chinese takeout on my lap. I couldn’t get her on the phone fast enough.

Since adolescence, my hair has been a steady proxy for my anxieties: I can track extreme stress by the nightmares I’ve had of sudden hair loss or a botched chemical job. In the most important ways, I’ve been spared by Covid-19 — my family healthy, my job secure, my lodgings stable — but I’ve still been restless with worry, unable to fall asleep before dawn. During those sleepless hours, I watched YouTube hair tutorials, each one titled with a technique (‘‘most natural crochet ever,’’ “easy protective style’’) and a promise (‘‘UNDER TWO HOURS,’’ ‘‘easy enough for beginners’’). Maybe I could learn something new.

I’ve never known how to do much with my hair because I never wanted to learn: Somewhere in middle school I got it in my head that smart women didn’t care about their looks, and all photos from the following decade prove that I took that to heart. As a child, I bonded with my mother or grandmother or sisters on nights when I could harangue them into wrapping my chemically straightened hair under a scarf. In college, I’d visit a salon during academic breaks, then persuade my friends to ‘‘get the back of my head’’ when I later touched up my roots with relaxer, but mostly I kept my hair short. For a majority of the past decade, I’ve let a braider handle my hair, rarely styling it myself beyond slicking it up into a bun or just letting it assume its own shape.

The pernicious theory that natural black hair is difficult to take care of is only true if you’re extremely lazy, which I am. I regard doing my hair regularly with the same enthusiasm as brushing my teeth or filing expenses — banalities that counterbalance the dance parties and first dates and beach days of life. Accordingly, I’ve worn my hair in the same exact style for six years. I first had it braided on a whim one summer afternoon and quickly decided that I’d never do it again. But then I bungled removing the braids, getting the extensions so knotted in with my actual hair that I had to cut out both, after which I decided that having braids for a while might be nice, actually. I’ve maintained them through changes in addresses and dress sizes and jobs and relationships, through tattoos added on my arms and nose rings extracted from my face, the most enduring change to my body I’d ever paid for. Every morning and evening, at home or away, in darkness or in light, sick, sad, drunk, I have looked at myself and seen the braids too.

But confined in my apartment for the past two months, I recognize very little about my life. The faces of my friends, now lit by their computer screens, seem slightly off, distorted by grief or fatigue or technology; my neighborhood is unnaturally hushed, devoid of the charcoal smokers dotting the sidewalk that mark the onset of nice weather; my handwriting has deteriorated from disuse. A few days before the stay-at-home orders began in New York, I took my braids down in preparation for my next appointment, leaving my hair to erupt into springy sections. So in the mirror now, my image is never quite what I expect to see. I feel mildly disoriented, as if I had followed a recipe but somehow the dish didn’t come out the way it looked in the picture. I had worn braids not for vanity but for control: without them, my hair, emboldened with its own direction, often looks the way it wants to, which can be different every day. With them, I look exactly the same, day in and day out, and I don’t have to do a thing.

During the first few days of self-isolation, my hair was my victory garden: I tended to it, feeding it protein and moisture, oil and cremes, throwing myself into its maintenance just to give myself something to do. I clarified it with Aztec clay, I rinsed it with apple-cider vinegar, I softened it with shea butter, I grew it with biotin. Over time, though, the instinct to settle my idle hands decreased, and in its place arose the desire for self-recognition. It’s not that I don’t like how I appear in the mirror now but rather that I’ve had very little say in the matter. Our personal choices have eroded; in isolation, I’d expected to miss all the normal things, like joining my friends late at dinner or running into someone on the subway, but I’ve been surprised by the other things: putting on eyeliner, wearing a new perfume, the temporary alterations that feel like a necessary part of autonomy.

Style, then, feels like the last indulgence. Economists cite the lipstick effect, a glossy theory that, in times of upheaval, sales of small indulgences like cosmetics increase — hard-won treats that lessen the impact. In the past few months, by some counts, nail-polish -purchases- have soared, most likely to people eager for a diversion. (Or maybe because we’re staring at our hands more than ever.) The results of our bodies left to their own devices — leg hair unwaxed, bangs overgrown, grays returning — seem striking because we can’t fix what we don’t like as easily as before. Most of the time, we can look more or less how we want, within good reason, but self-isolation has forced aesthetic choices on us, reducing us to mere bodies awaiting the inevitable.

The interim between what we look like now, dead-eyed and bushy all over, and how we might want to look feels like a vacation that has gone on for too long, its appeal loosening by the day. Some people have resorted to the drastic, shaving and dyeing and bleaching and growing out, sprinting toward the unknown. But for the most part, all I wanted is for something to resemble the way it appeared to me before.

Holed up in my home, I did not feel the same, a state I had limited control over, but I also did not look the same, and I figured that was the one thing I could change. In the middle of the night, I am convinced I can do anything, and after a few YouTube videos, I figured I could try, for the first time, to spend an hour blowing out my hair, another braiding it into eight neat cornrows that lay flat against my skull, braid those braids into a single braid, then loop 100 faux dreadlocks into each cornrow. The women on my screen made it look quick and easy; my insomnia reasoned that it gave me something to do.

So one Saturday morning, I angled my laptop on my bathroom sink, a tutorial queued up — in the harsh reality of day — to do a measly two cornrows. My first attempt went poorly — I tried to get the braids to adhere to the length of my scalp, but they crept off the nape of my neck no matter how many times I restarted. (One comment to the tutorial read: ‘‘Shout-out to all my black girls who still don’t understand how to cornrow even after watching all the videos on YouTube.’’) I wore them for four days anyway, a giddy black Pippi Longstocking. I began idly braiding my hair while on the phone or watching TV, the plaits growing smaller, my completion time shortening, my fingers becoming used to their job. My long-held evasion had stopped making sense — this wasn’t that bad! I speculated about my burgeoning expertise: Maybe I could start a natural hair YouTube channel myself; maybe I’d be the valued friend who ‘‘can do hair.’’ I stood to make so much money when this was all over! I looked in the mirror after a blind braiding during a long phone call. Practice had not made perfect. Practice had barely made OK.

I gave up on the dream of the eight cornrows. The YouTube algorithm led me to something easier: Marley twists, done with a particular type of synthetic hair, attached to the scalp with skillfully hidden rubber bands. They weren’t the same as box braids, but they’d provide the same heft, the approximate length, the framing around my face in the bathroom mirror. The beauty-supply store in my neighborhood remained open, stocked with masks and gloves and bundles of hair. The tutorial promised I could complete it in under two hours, which it underestimated by about two hours. The final result turned out sloppy and elementary — the parts are not well defined, the rubber band is too far away from the root, I ran out of hair. But I am comforted by its weight. Without thinking, I’ve restarted my habit of gathering up the strands and tying them into a bun on my head, grasping at anything familiar.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Jazmine Hughes is a story editor for the magazine. She last wrote about learning how to swim. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

About a week into lockdown, I was walking to a park near my house in Dublin for my state-sanctioned daily constitutional when I encountered, kneeling on the sidewalk, two middle-aged men in leather jackets, their shaved heads bowed and gleaming in the light of the midday sun. As I stepped into the street to give these men their space, I saw that they were kneeling at the entrance to an Orthodox church, their hands clasped before them in supplication. I kept walking, but I couldn’t put the men out of my mind. I kept seeing them: eyes closed, kneeling, praying to a locked door.

At that time, I was waking up in the morning and, before I was even conscious, I was aware of a bad feeling in my stomach, both very hard and very tender. It was a feeling I couldn’t quite identify, but one that reminded me of something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Suspecting I might feel better if I got some exercise, I bought a bike on the internet. I had never really cycled around Dublin before. I had barely cycled at all since I was a kid. Now that there were so few cars on the roads, it seemed like a good time to start, and cycling as an activity suddenly seemed to represent the highest form of freedom available. I cycled through the streets of the becalmed city, marveling at this place I had lived in my whole adult life, everything at once perfectly familiar and unrecognizably strange. I was curious about this uncanny place that was my home, but I was also curious about this feeling I had, the hard and tender pain in my gut. I wasn’t just sad — it was something else, like a complication of the underlying condition of sadness.

I cycled around Trinity College, and past the National Library, where before the virus hit I used to work several days a week. I cycled by Hodges Figgis, the large bookstore on Dawson Street where I had, over the years, spent hundreds of aimless hours browsing. Everything was shut and dark. But it wasn’t just that. The whole city suddenly felt like a massive Potemkin village, as though its former vitality and noise and humor had been an illusion, and the streets and the buildings were now revealed as an elaborate facade. It was somehow hard to believe any of it had ever been real.

I cycled through Temple Bar, a neighborhood normally lousy with tourists, my bike rattling over the slick cobbles of the empty streets. In the darkened window of an art-book store, among a display of zines and photography books, I saw a sign that read: ‘‘Home is where your bookshop is.’’ I looked at this dumbly for a while, and understood at last what the feeling was: It was homesickness. I was homesick.

I was a clingy child, and homesickness was a major theme of my early years. Sleepovers at friends’ houses invariably ended prematurely, not long after bedtime, with a call to my parents, who would come and get me and drive me home in my pajamas. I didn’t like having to do this, and the older I got the more ashamed I felt about it. One of my earliest memories: I was maybe 3 or 4, and my parents went away for a few days, and my older sister and I stayed with friends of the family. Their house had a room we children were not allowed into — a so-called ‘‘good room,’’ reserved for entertaining guests, a common-enough thing in Irish houses. Somehow, I conflated the room that I couldn’t enter with the parents I couldn’t see; in my mind, this room was where they had disappeared to. I remember standing outside in the front garden, peering through the gap between the curtains into that locked room and trying to catch a glimpse inside, of my parents, of home.

Something of this memory — of standing in front of a shut door with a sense that home was somehow behind it — clung to the experience of cycling through Dublin during lockdown. I was homesick for the place I was still in. But how could I be homesick? If anything, surely I was the opposite of homesick. I was sick of being at home, of having to stay within the two-kilometer radius around my house, beyond which I was legally restrained from venturing. How could I be homesick when I was spending almost all of my time in my house, with the people I loved most in the world?

But I was not at home. This was an odd thing to realize, given that in a strictly technical sense I clearly was at home. But I knew that I was not, because if I had been at home, I would have been in a different city. I would have been relishing some overheard snatch of absurdity on the street. I would have been irritated by a busker on Grafton Street belting out ‘‘My Heart Will Go On’’ on the panpipes. I would have been doing things whose former banality now seemed impossibly idyllic, like wondering whether going for one more takeout flat white would be overdoing it; deciding it would be, and then going for it anyway. Or running into a friend on the street, and then running into a second friend while I was still catching up with the first.

But none of these things were possible right now. I was home, was the thing, but I was not at home. I was no more at home than those men on the sidewalk were at church. I was kneeling in front of a locked door, feeling that home was somewhere behind it. I was peering through a window, desperate for a glimpse of everything I missed so badly.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Mark O'Connell is a writer based in Dublin. His last article for the magazine about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was adapted from his recent book "Notes From an Apocalypse." Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

A new intrusive thought to consider: On average, the human body sheds its entire bag of skin — more than a billion cells — every 28 days. Since the beginning of self-quarantine, I have shed my husk more than twice, casting off thousands of skin cells each second. Every morning, after my waking groan, I sat up half-awake in bed, watching the shards of my disintegrating self turning over in a tone-deaf ray of sun. Free of the virus, that was how I was dying — incrementally, and mainly from self-pity. Others are not as lucky, I thought, with the grandeur of a person who fights by doing nothing, whose suffering takes up negative space. The neighbors banged pots and pans to alleviate their guilt. I thought about skin as it floated through the air, landed on the bureau, remade itself as dust.

Dust, as a collective noun, means almost nothing. The word is suggestive of dryness and smallness — tiny unknown pieces, combined with other pieces, which remain to be discovered like the bottom of the sea. There is road dust and coal dust and stardust and space dust. Household dust, a lively field of scientific study, is thought to contain domestic life in microcosm: mainly sloughed-off skin and hair, but also sweater fibers and pet dander, dried-out bugs and tracked-in outdoor dirt. A zillion motes of dust make up a singular ‘‘dust bunny.’’ Like a fine wine or the neuroses of siblings, each is unique to its own environment. My dust is me, and the friends I can’t have over. Yours is you, and the life outside your window, and the life of every tenant before you. Gross — but who right now can turn down company?

The word for both adding and removing dust is ‘‘dust.’’ I dusted my way through self-quarantine with a box of dollar-store dryer sheets, encountering my home on a microscopic scale, as nothing but motes landing on horizontal planes. Experts say you should dust from high to low, letting the dust from the higher-up realms settle in the lower-down ones before you clean them. This is a pretty good housekeeping tip, presupposing the duster believes that cleanliness is the most desirable outcome. Right now I don’t know what I believe. In quarantine, I dust for distraction. I dust the baseboards. I dust the dark side of the fan blades. I dust the tops of the light bulbs in my lamps. I dust for a universe I can control. The thing about dusting is it is endless. Even as you dust, you make dust.

The management of household dust was a petty bourgeois fixation from the start. The chore was first emphasized in the mid-1800s, as dust from the just-industrialized street was beginning to threaten the newly sealed middle-class home. In her 1966 book, ‘‘Purity and Danger,’’ the British anthropologist Mary Douglas described this encroachment as matter ‘‘out of place.’’ Cleanliness was next to godliness, they said then, as they do now. Dirt symbolized a collapse of social order. The maintenance of this order usually fell on women, whose level of commitment to dust management symbolized moral piety, and later, in the inverse, liberation. In her 1949 book, ‘‘The Second Sex,’’ Simone de Beauvoir suggested that a fixation on housework offered women a flight from themselves and the world. ‘‘Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework,’’ she wrote. ‘‘The clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.’’ In de Beauvoir’s view, the life of Sisyphus was torture. At least he got to go outside.

Self-quarantine has me thinking and acting in all kinds of backward ways. Victorian metaphors are tantalizing, with cosseted elites at home baking bread as labor outside is ruthlessly exploited. Even as scientific thinking has evolved, a facile sense of germ theory prevails, with particulate life understood in stubbornly moral terms. Inside the house, the dust bunnies are friendly. Outside, there’s the wet malintent of disease. People used to gossip about social behaviors, but now microbial rumors spread: The virus thrives on your reusable grocery bags; it can leap from the mouth of an oncoming jogger and hang in the air for up to a week. All we get told for sure is wash your hands. Log on to check the death count every day and wonder when it will finally be over. At least with the dusting, there is evidence of progress.

As I sit and write, a new layer of dust accumulates. Later on this evening, I’ll make another round, Swiffering the baseboards, wiping down the ledges, dragging a sock along the porcelain toilet tank. The underside of a dusty cloth has the cozy, filthy horror of a yellow Q-tip. Better out than in! Coping mechanisms are always some combination of perverse and pathetic. Through dusting I’ve found a means of control, a form of endlessness I can contain.

Right now, the world has only two scales — big and small — and both go on forever. I am so, so tired of endlessness: the unrelenting boredom, the cycles of self-pity, the constant systemic breakdown, the eternity of death. I long to think about big, dumb things that have an end: a steak from a restaurant, the nave in a church, a hug from a friend of a friend, the Grand Canyon.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a contributing writer for the magazine whose last article was about the film adaptation of the musical “Cats.” Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.

Every child knows about cocoons. They’re one of the first things we learn about the natural world. What the ABCs are to language, cocoons are to biology. They introduce us to the wonder of metamorphosis: A little blobby squirmy thing disappears into a sac and emerges as a flamboyant colorful flappy thing. Magic! In fact, that is exactly how we tend to learn about it — as one of nature’s great magic tricks, if not inexplicable then largely unexplained. The emphasis always seems to be on the before and the after, never the during.

Lately, I have found myself wondering — as I sit here hunched inside my dark house, for infinity weeks, hardly moving, wearing the same green sweatshirt while eating the same four snacks — about cocoons. I don’t really care anymore what goes in or what comes out; those are questions for different times, for ancient pasts and distant futures. I’m interested in precisely the part of the story that tends to be skipped: the confinement, the waiting, the darkness, the change.

What is it actually like inside a cocoon? Is it cozy and peaceful? Or cramped and dim? Is the bug’s stay voluntary, involuntary or something in between? And what really happens during that seemingly magical change? Is it inspiring and wondrous? Or is it unpleasant and grim? What did I not learn in kindergarten?

It turns out that the inside of a cocoon is — at least by outside-of-a-cocoon standards — pretty bleak. Terrible things happen in there: a campaign of grisly desolation that would put most horror movies to shame. What a caterpillar is doing, in its self--imposed quarantine, is basically digesting itself. It is using enzymes to reduce its body to goo, turning itself into a soup of ex-caterpillar — a nearly formless sludge oozing around a couple of leftover essential organs (tracheal tubes, gut).

Only after this near-total self-annihilation can the new growth begin. Inside that gruesome mush are special clusters of cells called ‘‘imaginal discs,’’ which sounds like something from a Disney movie but which I have been assured is actual biology. Imaginal discs are basically the seeds of crucial butterfly structures: eyes, wings, genitalia and so on. These parts gorge themselves on the protein of the deconstructed caterpillar, growing exponentially, taking form, becoming real. That’s how you get a butterfly: out of the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar.

The caterpillar I know best was created, out of scraps of painted paper, by a man who grew up in Nazi Germany: Eric Carle. ‘‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’’ is a small, eccentric masterpiece — a children’s book, yes, but also a formative exploration of the complex nature of change. Like many children, I read the book so many times that it blended into my psyche as a kind of background color. Years later, I read it again so many times with my own children that it blended into their psyches too, and back into my own again, this time in a deeper color.

Recently, when I reread ‘‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’’ alone, in quarantine, it felt less like reading than remembering. And yet I was also slightly surprised. Carle’s caterpillar is, of course, more than just a caterpillar; it is a classic existentialist antihero — a lonely creature of pure need, guided by only its own ravenousness, skirting the knife’s edge between self-destruction and growth. What surprised me this time was that so little of the book is devoted to that final act of transformation — the magic change we are always taught to anticipate. Mainly, the book is a catalog of eating. Ridiculous, ceaseless, maniacal, necessary but also unwise eating.

Things start out fine. The caterpillar tunnels through one food after another: an apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, three plums on Wednesday and so forth. He always leaves a little hole in his wake, a literal hole in the book’s pages — his hunger is so powerful that it begins to destroy the very story of his hunger. By Saturday, the caterpillar has abandoned all sense and started bingeing on junk food: a piece of chocolate cake, an ice cream cone, a pickle, a slice of cherry pie, a cupcake — the kind of caloric intake, surely, that will not help an insect with its ultimate long-term goals. Sure enough, the caterpillar ends up curled at the bottom of the page with a stomachache, eyes squished and drooping, mouth compressed to a miserable line.

This moment in the book hit me deeply. Staring into that caterpillar’s wretched face felt like looking into a mirror. In quarantine, I, too, have been ravenously bingeing. When I pass through a room, I leave it practically riddled with holes. I have worked my way through bags of chips, bags of gummy candy, bags of unsalted walnuts, jars of peanut butter, tubs of ice cream, boxes of cereal. And the consumption goes far beyond food. Along with the rest of America, I devoured the cursed docu-series ‘‘Tiger King’’ with hardly a break. I have been playing so many hours of the Nintendo game ‘‘Animal Crossing’’ that my wife sometimes peeks cautiously into the room and asks: ‘‘Is there some way I can help you? Are you sure you want to still be playing this?’’

I am speaking to you now from the inside of my cocoon. You, presumably, are listening from inside your own. It could be an apartment, a room, a closet or a farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere on the site of an abandoned commune. Perhaps, like me, you have been living a self-destructive quarantine cocoon life. Maybe you are not using junk food or video games to numb the pain, but you are probably using something. The data suggests that most of us are. A friend recently sent me his phone’s weekly screen-time report. It was down 15 percent, to 10 hours 50 minutes a day. Utility companies say that people are sleeping in — spikes in energy use that typically occurred around 6 a.m. are now happening much later. The very shape of society is dissolving in front of our eyes. ‘‘Workdays,’’ ‘‘mealtimes,’’ ‘‘holidays’’ — all these rituals that were designed to help us shape our days have now been drained of meaning. Society has become, in large part, boneless. A soup of ex-society.

Watching it happen, all over the planet, has been horrible. There is no other word for it. It has been horrible inside overrun hospitals — the multiplying hopelessness, the gasping of those who can’t be saved. It has been differently horrible inside our own houses, where we wonder how to help as we refresh internet spreadsheets and watch the numbers rise: cases, tests, deaths. It has been horrible to read about the stories behind those numbers. It has been horrible to watch for tiny signs of illness in the people we love the most. Horrible to feel our own foreheads, wondering if we are warm. Horrible to be warm. Horrible to be cool. Horrible not to be sure.

How do we even begin to process all of this — this cataclysm that is happening simultaneously in slow motion and all at once, on distant continents and inside our own cells? Months in, we still have no idea when it will end or what we will all come out looking like. The metamorphoses are happening mostly in private, all over the place, in billions of individual pods — acts of internal self--destruction and rebuilding, subtle shifts and whole revolutions.

I keep asking myself, as pretzel crumbs spill down the front of my sweatshirt, what I have learned from quarantine. On most days, honestly, it feels like nothing. The main question we seem to answer in quarantine is circular: How would we handle ourselves in quarantine? On particularly bad days, as I blink myself awake at 11 a.m. and promptly reopen Twitter, I feel that I’ve actually learned less than nothing — that my knowledge is rolling backward. Before the world shut down, I swear on my Cool Ranch Doritos, I was working on myself, exercising regularly and making plans and sticking to them. I was generating lists, and lists of lists, and lists of lists of lists. I listened to a whole audiobook about forming good habits. But now all of that has gone away. For the moment at least, in the face of this horror and sadness and confusion, as I watch the curves grow worse on the terrifying graphs, my fantasies of self--improvement have evaporated. Maybe they weren’t essential. Maybe they needed to be rethought. Or maybe they just needed to go dormant for a while.

A caterpillar doesn’t choose to go into its cocoon. ‘‘Cocoon,’’ actually, in the case of butterflies, is the wrong word. My apologies to Eric Carle, but it is actually a chrysalis, a hard shell that was inside the caterpillar’s body the whole time. From the ancient Greek chrysos, ‘‘gold’’ — a golden envelope of internal self--destruction. In order to expose the chrysalis, the caterpillar just has to slough off its chubby outer layer. It seals itself inside itself. No decision is really made; it’s just a matter of hormonal cascades — cues beyond the understanding of the creature being cued. The caterpillar stays inside because it has to. And when it comes out, it is a different thing. We tell that story one way. The caterpillar no doubt experiences it very differently.

Is a butterfly’s life any better than a caterpillar’s? Was all that suffering in the cocoon worth it? Is a volcano happier after it erupts? These are children’s questions. It doesn’t even make sense to ask. The bug has no choice. The cocoon is forced upon it. And then nature runs its course.

But here is one thing I have learned in quarantine: The world can stop. This is not a small thing, nor is it easy. It is not necessarily good or bad. History teaches us, again and again, that change does not mean progress, that metamorphosis does not mean improvement. When society dissolves, we — the ones who make up society — dissolve right along with it. When our familiar structures become unrecognizable, we become unrecognizable to ourselves. This means suffering. We are confused and miserable and terrified and heart-broken. We find ourselves continually annoyed with our families. We sleep too long or not long enough, eat too much or not enough. We stop exercising and attend absurd virtual meetings meant to simulate work or school. We clap outside at 7 p.m.

But I believe that the situation, as bleak as it may seem, may also contain the seeds of its own transformation — somewhere very deep in the formless mush.

Let’s not forget that in our horrendous confusion — in spite of it, because of it — we managed to do something amazing. We chose to go dormant. We changed almost everything in the world, almost overnight. This required a kind of collective action that, frankly, would have struck me as impossible five months ago. There are, of course, outliers, loudmouths and nihilists and malcontents. They will always exist. But enough people are not that. Enough of us have found enough reasons to change, and it has made an actual difference. We are in the middle of creating whatever the new world will be. We did it, and we are doing it, every day.

Meanwhile, I am still sitting here in my chrysalis, ravenous, sad, confused, feeling simultaneously changed and unchanged. Perhaps one of these afternoons, many months from now, I will be nibbling away at whatever happens to be in front of me, and it will turn out not to be more gummy bears but something else, the actual wall of my enclosure, and I will eat enough to make a hole, and then I will look out, with a whole new kind of eyes, to see what sort of world is waiting for me, and what I have become in it.

Illustration by Brian Rea.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “Boom Town,” a book about Oklahoma City. He last wrote a profile of the musician Weird Al Yankovic. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book “Death Wins a Goldfish” was published last year.