“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost,” is one of many lines that Dante Alighieri wrote in the 14th century that seem totally appropriate for March 2021.
It’s appropriate for me today, because I spent the day on Zoom doing exactly the same thing I did in person one year ago today-a day that for me is when it became clear that that COVID was going to change my life and the lives of everyone else as well. To mark my personal milestone, today’s #stampoftheday is a 5-cent stamp, issued in 1965, that honored the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. The stamp pictures Dante wearing a wreath (a symbol of poetry) before a background relating to “The Divine Comedy,” an epic poem recounting that narrator’s visits to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Douglas Gorsline, a noted American painter, writer, and book illustrator, designed the stamp.
While I date the start of my descent to Friday March 6, 2020, that day was the culmination of a week of increasingly ominous news and changes, some that I remember and some that I was able to document by going through old email.
Here’s my reconstruction of those days.
At our regular staff meeting on Monday, March 2 we talked about the need to pay closer attention to hygiene.
On Tuesday, the stock market was dropped precipitously. As that was happening, I was attending a day-long meeting with several economists. I vividly recall that at one point, a thoughtful older economist whose views I’ve always taken seriously, asked if people thought COVID was going to be “a stumble,” “a fall down the stairs,” or “a fall down an elevator shaft”? The consensus, as I recall, was a fall down the stairs, with a significant minority (including the man who asked the question) thinking it would be a stumble. I think one person may have said we might be falling down a shaft, but I’m not sure. I am sure that it was not a widely held held view in the group.
On Wednesday, Harvard’s Executive Vice-President sent a university-wide announcing that the university was now prohibiting work-related tips to China, Iran, Italy, and South Korea and discouraging all other non-essential international. In what in retrospect looks like the understatement of the year, the EVP also noted, “The known prevalence of COVID-19 infection in the U.S. is changing rapidly. Use caution and judgment in planning domestic travel.”
On Friday, I spent most the day in a conference room as part of a four-person committee (two of whom had just flown up from Washington) that was interviewing finalists for a competitive summer fellowship. In the middle of the day, we took a break for a packed seminar that featured one of the committee members (and that I moderated).
The committee reconvened and wrapped up its work in the late afternoon. When we were done, I returned to my office, which is next to the conference room, to check my email before I went home.
That’s when it became clear that, as Dorothy says, we weren’t in Kansas anymore. I had another email from the university’s senior leaders announcing major restrictions on travel and events. I had a note from officials at the Graduate School of Design telling me that in accordance with those new guidelines we had had a major event were planning for late March and a half-day symposium we were planning for mid April. I emailed speakers and panelists to share the news. And then I went home in a state of shock.
The following Monday, we hosted an event for an out-of-town that drew about 75 people. And we took her out to dinner in a crowded restaurant after the talk.
The next day, Harvard announced that after spring break, which was to being at the end of the week, the university would go virtual.
That Thursday, I put my laptop and some other items in a tote bag, walked across an eerily silent and almost deserted campus, and drove to MIT for the last of a series of swim classes I was taking with my daughter (who said she had never seen me so troubled as I was that night).
In the year since then, I’ve made two brief visits to my office. Both times, I picked up some things I needed for my home office and left as quickly as possible.
Today, these moments came flooding back because the same selection committee met to again, exactly one year later, to interview finalists for our fellowship. But this time, those interviews were on Zoom.
It was bittersweet and poignant. I realized that given the crowded rooms and the presence of travelers, I could have been (but wasn’t) infected last March. Indeed, thus far I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been able to work from home as has my wife. One of our daughters has figured out how to do garden education for elementary school students online. The other found what seems to be a terrific new job in the midst of a pandemic. Both are in relatively young relationships with people who are helping them get through these challenging times. None of us (knock on wood) has been sick. And while being home all the time with limited options is a drag, it’s also opened my eyes to many simple wonders (and also led to this odd #stampoftheday project, which is now in its 11th month).
So my COVID hasn’t been a time of “all hope abandon, ye who enter here,” as Dante famously wrote. Rather, “my course [has been] set for an uncharted sea.” Much of that journey has been challenging. But, I hope, it also will have been a time when I was able to follow Dante’s urging to “consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. And it doesn’t appear to be an oncoming train.
Be well, stay safe, “follow virtue and knowledge,” fight for justice and work for peace.