Reading Through the Pandemic

by Jeremy Clarke

A rare charm of this year of lockdowns and thin company is the chance to read as much as I used to in college. It is fun in itself, but I have also, time and again, been struck by how differently I respond to great literature in my late 30s, as to when I read it in my late teens (I started college young in Australia and only had a few months left once I turned 20). One example is “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by Yeats. At 17, I was convinced it justified every dumb thing I had ever done and wanted to do. Rediscovering it lately, it describes the heart of foolish waste and tragedy; perhaps not least because I lost somebody close to me, who exhibited just that kind of beautiful recklessness in the poem until it caused her needless death in a small aircraft at 33. As a father now, one who proudly declares himself “risk-adverse”, I barely remember the 17-year-old who cherished the wanton thrill of “Airman”.
Great literature is like that, or it has become that way for me now. It’s a relationship and like a good relationship, it changes over time. As a thoroughly lapsed Catholic who abhors ritualized fitness, I have no church or gym to return to. If I am to chart any “growth” (to use that American term), it is writers who I check back in with. I have found no better evidence of getting older. They show me where I used to be wrong about them, and what I missed.
 
One author I have spent many new hours with this year is the great New Yorker, Joan Didion, a hero to my teenage self. Kindly indulge me a brief tangent here: My daughter’s middle name is Joan – named for three Joans. My first cousin twice removed is Joan Clarke, who broke the Nazi Enigma code at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing, to whom she was briefly engaged. (When I met her, she did not much resemble Keira Knightley, who played her in the movie.) I could not think of a better example to inspire my daughter: someone who helped kill an awful lot of Nazis purely by being awesome at math, a “man’s discipline”. The next Joan, which will surprise you, is Joan from “Mad Men”. My wife and I watched it during her pregnancy; here we have another Joan ahead of her time, and my daughter was absurdly born during the series finale, which we watched live at Mt. Sinai in the early stages of labor. The third Joan is Joan Didion, and her essay “Self-Respect” is the piece of writing I have thought about most this year.

At 17, “Self-Respect” washed over me vaguely; it seemed to make healthy sense and I hoped I lived up to its challenge. That was all. Then I forgot about it for 20 years. How different it feels to read it now in this year of COVID. It was written in 1967 and lamented the passing from fashion of some old-world notions and terms: charactergritself-respect. She wrote of the “slipping prestige” of such qualities:
 
“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues ...  Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had it instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts ... That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed-forth.”
 
Such style is even further out of fashion than in was in 1967. I cannot imagine entreaties to “be stronger!” have much to do with social work these days, though (hesitantly) I confess a certain nostalgia for it. The phrase my grandfather uttered to me most was “toughen up” (or sometimes “harden up” in the Australian), which was itself a kind of indulgence; more typical was a turning-up of the nose at some display of my perceived weakness. This was a man born in rural Queensland during the Depression, named “Shirley” after a coal mine, had rotten teeth pulled by the local blacksmith, fought in the Pacific and was shot in the back by his brother. God knows what he thought of my blubbing over a bloody knee. But in the modern moment, you could ask what potential damage was wrought that he gave my considerable fears and imperfections no space. A good deal, I imagine. And then there is that other question that nags at me these many years later: is there any place for “toughen up”? For what, if anything, do I owe it?
 
Apparently, that attitude belongs in the past; meanwhile those words bubble up in my mind more than they probably ought. Especially this year, when some healthy young adults betray such theatrical self-concern, while others scream compulsively about interference (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” – another Yeats line written pompously on my college wall.) Among adults, is it always the elderly who fare well by this comparison? The nature of this virus has delivered a perverse proving ground in this regard. It preys on certain demographics so much more than on others, and yet, it is the steadfastness of the vulnerable groups that my grandfather would easily recognize. Joan Didion, too, perhaps. At least that has been my perception.
 
That is to pass no comment whatsoever on the non-adults. It will take years to know the full toll of this year upon them. From the moment I wake up I obsess over how to solve, or at least mitigate, this experience for them. What support, what compensation, what service can we continue to provide?
 
Still, at the end of this short essay – safe in the knowledge that few people are still reading it – I do quietly ask whether there might yet be some small role for “toughen up” today; just one tactic among others? Could any young person, any at all, grow in virtue under the explicit expectation of such a demand?
 
No, I guess not – or at least not without risk. Nevertheless, I thought I would write it down somewhere just in case.
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