Today was quite a day. In terms of my personal life, it was my first day teaching the kids at home. My wife is one of the tech coaches for her district, so she spent all day triaging the online transition. I luckily have two weeks off, and so can be there for the kids. With their help I drew up a schedule for the day, and we actually did a lot. I started teaching them piano, we read, did math, talked about writing poetry over Skype with their auntie, made art, and wrote. After the "school day" ended we've had their friends who live next door over. I don't know if that's kosher under the current rules, but I want their parents to be able to mentally survive this, and we spend so much time together we might as well live in the same house anyway.
Having the "school day" so organized was a good idea. It's kept me busy and given order to my day. I actually look forward to tomorrow, which will have a St. Patrick's Day theme. The only issue is that my kids have a lot of energy and so do their friends and I am feeling drained while they run wild. I will probably have to get less ambitious.
In terms of the broader world, the last two days have given me whiplash. Yesterday I took the kids to the playground when no other kids were there, today the town has shut down all the playgrounds. New Jersey, along with New York and Connecticut, has said restaurants (apart from takeout), bars and theaters are all to be shuttered. A week ago today I was teaching and we were preparing to go remote, but after spring break. Events are moving fast.
This has given me insight into past events. I think particularly about the summer of 1914. The death of Franz Ferdinand happened in late June, and so many Europeans spent their July frolicking, the rumors of war just background noise. (Even Kaiser Wilhelm was at his spa!) All of a sudden, the war hit. The memoir The Burning of the World by Hungarian writer Bela Zombory-Moldovan describes it so evocatively. He learned he had to mobilize while on a seaside vacation.
I also have whiplash because the president seems to be changing his tune. Yesterday he spent his press briefing reading tweets off of paper meant to defend himself from the evil news media. Today he said nice things about that same media while, for the first time, offering concrete recommendations to restrict the transmission of the virus. Of course, he tweeted tonight about the "China Virus." This after I have heard about people I know being harassed or micro-aggressed for being Asian.
The distancing and online teaching had for days given me a feeling of purpose that sustained me. Today I started feeling dread again. I really and truly wonder just how long these measures can be sustained. Right now I do not think it will be sustainable to have all of our education to be moved online and huge swaths of our economy go dormant. The only way disaster could have been avoided would have been with swift action months ago. Now we are going to have to live with the consequences, which will be terrible no matter how much distancing we do.
Books
I am also planning on logging all the books I am reading in this time. I plan on using books as an anchor, and now that I am getting old I forget books pretty quickly after I read them any more.
John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden
I started this book years ago and didn't finish it. I am craving baseball and sad without it, so I turned to the only unread baseball book on my shelf. It's the story of the early days of baseball, from its origins to around 1900. Thorn likes to include the entire text of documents within his text, which is really distracting. While it was interesting to know that modern baseball evolved out of a number of games (and thus has no fixed origin) some of the details needed streamlining. At the same time, his look into the mythology of baseball's origins was fascinating. Albert Goodwill Spalding, who founded the National League in addition to a sports equipment empire, was a Theosophist. So was Abner Doubleday, and a big part of the reason for the myth pushed by Spalding and others that Doubleday invented the rules of baseball in Cooperstown, New York. (No such thing ever happened.) Truth is stranger than fiction.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
These days I tend to have one fiction and one non-fiction book on my reading stove with one pot simmering and the other really cooking. During my train commutes I had been reading the Library of America edition of John Cheever's collected stories. I am really loving them, but they are such fine-tuned and realistic vignettes of everyday suburban commuting life that is hard to read them under quarantine. I am saving that book for when I get to ride the train again. I love a good doorstop 19th century novel, but I tend to save those for summer when I have more time to read. A good long novel also helps time slow down. In that spirit I purchased both Middlemarch and War and Peace. I went with the former first because I am in a strangely English mood these days and I've never read Eliot before. I hate to say this, but so far it's been tough going. Her prose style thus far is as dry as church dinner chicken. Maybe my problem was that I started reading it around a bunch of insane, screaming children. In any case I love 19th century social novels. I wish we had their equivalent today. You could certainly write a good one about our current situation.
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