About that pandemic

One place solitude really shines is when there is a pandemic. By breaking the chain of transmission in the most complete way possible, the occupant of the hermitage performs a service. 

Indeed one may think of recent lockdowns and the designation of quarantine sites such as hotel rooms as a bloom of something very like hermitages and hermitaries (cell attached to the monastery).

Isolation during a pandemic is not new; Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), for example, depicts a group of young women and men who retire to a country place to escape the plague. The one hundred stories they tell one another to pass the time is their streaming service. 

Undoubtedly their motivation to isolate was fear or prudence; but retiring from the presence of others to prevent transmission from oneself to others has been for some time understood to be a public health measure.

Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for example, recounts lockdown procedures: 

The Master of every House, as soon as any one in his House complaineth, either of Botch, or Purple, or Swelling in any part of his Body, or falleth otherwise dangerously Sick, without apparent Cause of some other Disease, shall give knowledge thereof to the Ex­aminer of Health, within two Hours after the said Sign shall appear. ... So soon as any Man shall be found by this Examiner, Chirurgeon or Searcher to be sick of the Plague, he shall the same Night be sequestred, in the same House, and in case he be so sequestred, then, though he afterwards die not, the House wherein he sickned, should be shut up for a Month, after the use of the due Preser­vatives taken by the rest.

During the Great Depression, prefabicated huts, many of them much like my own, were distributed by the federal government to families needing to isolate a family member stricken by tuberculosis.

Source: New Deal of the Day

In early March of 2020, our household chose to form a pod with our son, but we did not know if any of us had been exposed to the new virus. We determined to isolate from one another for a set number of days; Beloved made meals and slid them to Son past a plastic sheet that divided the house into two parts; I ransacked the pantry and moved into the hut. I already had water, books, musical instruments, electricity, phone, Internet, and a composting potty, so I felt pretty set.

But, as it turned out, I had likely been exposed just before we closed the gate. Within a week I came down with a serious illness: fever, chills, shortness of breath, endless coughing, and a sense that my left lung was burning with a cold blue fire. I had never experienced anything like it.

Was it Covid? Local medical authorities had assured us it had not yet reached the area.

Testing was unavailable, and given the emergency that was just beginning to hit the local hospitals, I chose to ride it out. It would have been more responsible to do this if I'd had an oximeter with me, but one can't think of everything.

After a day or two, the fever broke, and I coughed on and on, and slept sitting up, for another seven days. Feeling pretty sure I was no longer contagious, I moved back into the house and rejoined the pod. The others showed no symptoms.

Daughter was our "essential worker" during this time (as during so many other times), bringing groceries and toilet paper from town and dispensing endless, if rather distant, cheer.

As she lived alone, and the County Health Department, where she worked, had at her insistence implemented work-from-home, her place, like the hut, became yet another among millions of "hermitages" across the world. 

In her house and ours, missing one another, we lay down at night and rose in the morning keenly aware that we knew nothing of what the future might bring. 

But we did feel we were doing rightly.

I think making huts widely available would have helped with this disaster; they are a relatively inexpensive solution, and choosing solitude (when able) on behalf of others is not burdensome if one takes a certain view of things. 

Thinking of it this way, a respirator is a hermitage of sorts.

While no one lives forever, let us take care in not making one another ill. Things are tough enough as it is. 

As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space
an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble
a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning:
view all created things like this. 

-- Diamond Sutra, Red Pine tr.