I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.Like Jack Kerouac, we are definitely at a crossroads. For his character in On the Road, these changes come not from within; they are external. He went through a divorce. He just finished college. He was offered a job on a ship, and all of these things brought him across the country when, in the center of it all, he forgets himself briefly, only to realize that amidst all these external forces he too is changing.
In times like these it feels wrong to think about yourself. We keep reading on the news or in university emails that COVID-19 is something truly unprecedented. I certainly can never remember countries on lockdown, I have never been this scared for the vulnerabilities of older people, and while it is easy to think about in the abstract, I have never seen inequality in America so realized as it is now. De Blasio had a choice to make: schools would either close, leaving children no place to go after school and placing unfathomable burden on their families who do not have the resources to take care of them, or schools would remain open and, as a consequence, contagion would be perpetuated in New York City to risk the lives of both children and the elderly. Doctors elsewhere have to choose between life and death because nations have not had the forethought to actually prepare for pandemic-level proportions of illness. Governments across the world have delayed their responses to COVID-19, and as such they are guilty of second-degree murder on the scale of, at the very least, thousands — thousands of loved ones lost, countless more jobs gone, a world, to crudely echo Kerouac, at a dividing line between its past and its future.
So how could it be o.k. to be thinking about myself right now? Are we awful human beings for being preoccupied with ourselves while others face the consequences of COVID-19 on a scale that, right now, is unimaginable for most of us as Americans, as young adults? Last year I took a very heartwarming class called The Literary History of Atrocity. In it, our professor stressed over and over again this quote from George Eliot's Middlemarch, even asking (or forcing) us to memorize it:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.Eliot is right — our capacity for understanding and feeling the pain of others must have a limit. But equally right is Kerouac, who reminds us that in moments when we lose ourselves, when we find ourselves in a given place due to circumstances largely beyond our control, we have no choice but to boomerang back to thinking about ourselves. What his scene here shows is that this boomerang effect has nothing to do with apathy nor narcissism. What Kerouac shows us is that external changes force us to self-reflect because we are changed by them. In other words, external changes are an internal change too. As obvious as that might sound, I find it an extraordinarily comforting thought at this time.
It is not psychopathic to lament the abrupt end of a college semester. In the universal scheme of things, compared to the overall world-changing tragedies and panics, this is an insignificant and a truly privileged concern; but this change we are going through is just as much descendent of our current state of things as any other development in the news. Now is an o.k. time for self-reflection because we are being changed by the same forces changing the rest of the world, and this is not a personal change that should go unrecognized if we are to think about how to move past COVID-19 for a future of better healthcare, hygiene, economic equity, and improved public health infrastructure. Because we are quickly realizing that we are all intertwined in this world. Understanding ourselves, as well as everyone else, as caught in the middle of it is how we can accurately put a personal stake into the collection of voices that need to come together in a time like this. We have the opportunity to lay bare the unsustainability of our way of life. We should ensure that everyone affected — which in reality seems to be almost everyone on Earth at this point — is accounted for in the reconstruction of this disaster. But that everyone includes ourselves.
