The Lamb of March and Lion of April

Today has been mixed.

To begin with the harder stuff, the Berlin evening news had a segment about the postponement of burials and funeral services due to the coronavirus crisis. They showed film of a recent interment and the sight brought back recollections of my father's funeral.

I've been meaning since 2017 to go to the graveyard where the funeral took place and to begin to think of it as just another graveyard again. But I need to have someone who did not know Papa, to go with me to help me keep up a stoic façade. I feel I can remember every detail — what I wore, how many people were in the bus, the trees, each flower that we cast into the hole for the urn — of the day of Papa's funeral. It is too fresh.

Maybe in 2019, I almost had a mini-panic attack when my colleagues and I were on a weekend walk and we passed a graveyard that looked like it. I told myself to breathe, in and out; and reminded myself that we were in a different part of the city; and I don't think any colleague saw that anything was wrong.

So I find it hardly bearable to think how much worse burying a loved one is, under the present conditions (the number of attendees limited to ten, not being able to hug people, having ceremonies postponed indefinitely due to virus-related understaffing), for other families.

Then the newscast mentioned that a neurologist and 30-year partner of our former mayor, Klaus Wowereit, had just died at 54 from the effects of a Covid-19 infection. And then, of course, the death by suicide of the finance minister of one of Germany's states, due in part to the pressure of trying to figure out how to rescue the state's economy.

Fortunately there were also cheerful parts of the newscast, and the weather.

But there were good experiences today, too. It hailed a little, white pearls that could almost have been shaken from the blossoming trees; the breeze stirred the budded twigs and whirled the hail; and little snowflakes streamed through the sky and one of them — like the song from The Sound of Music — stayed on my nose.

In the afternoon, Ge. and I jogged to a park. I never feel like I can run or jog for longer periods without a long warm-up first, but today it worked. He is a nice person to jog with; despite his longer legs he went at a gentler pace for me. He also demonstrates the 'social distancing' well, planning where we run so that we wouldn't come too close to others, and slowing down his pace nearly to a standstill when we had to accommodate walkers.

In the park there were the plane trees, whose wintry trunks seemed to say that they had seen war and peace for over a century, and yet they were there still. I felt tempted once or twice to pat them. And we heard a woodpecker in the distance.

But the loveliest part was a bridge, which was renovated perhaps last year and now gleams very brightly. A dense dark grey cloud banded overheard, behind the tan-brown clock tower of the Schöneberg City Hall. Sunlight poured out from behind us. The tasseled twigs of a willow were ochre almost turning into pale spring green in front.

And everywhere, running and walking and cycling and pushing children's strollers through the deeply green lawns, with dark-blue-veined chionodoxa hidden in the margins, there were people who were numerously but safely turning to Nature for cheer and help, at a time of benign but sustained imprisonment.

A Stroll in the Park and Little Ghosts

In more cheerful news, after only going out once each the past Thursday mornings to go grocery-shopping in the organic food store across the street — it is almost empty at that time, with four staff distributed over it and maybe up to three shoppers in the whole store, so the hypochondriac in me could hardly have been happier —, I finally went outside for a frivolous, selfish, healthy walk this morning.

It was quiet and there was an early morning feel although it was past 9 a.m., the birds were cheeping and whirring, the number of pedestrians was low and the vehicular traffic is much sparser this week compared to the beginning of last week. In preference to pressing pedestrian crossing buttons, I have to confess that now I sometimes just amble across the street because there are no moving cars nearby. A police car rolled along the street and I wondered if they were checking for social distancing guideline adherence.

(In the past two weeks, I also saw police cars patrolling to make sure that the restaurants observed the then-6 p.m. curfew. Now, of course, it's forbidden to sit down in an eating establishment; one must order to-go, and the chairs are stacked inverted on the tables. There is a daily update about social distancing infractions on the Berlin city government's website and in the Berlin evening news, which mentioned 40 infractions yesterday.)

On March 17th, the last time I'd been on a proper walk, it had been a surprise to me that cinemas etc. were closed and dark without any signage whatsoever, except one piece of paper in a poster vitrine that promised 'Wir sind bald wieder für Sie da.' They were shut down too quickly and it was too unclear when they could reopen. But now shops are prepared.

And on the elaborately carved 19th-century door of a residential apartment building, I saw a sign that promised help and offered phone numbers to anyone who wished someone else to go shopping on their behalf. This kind of initiative is often being taken for Berliners with preexisting medical conditions.

Then, after 'checking in' on familiar shops on my block to see which ones were open and which weren't, I decided to enjoy my freedom and try to regain a feeling of normality by going to one of my favourite walking destinations. And soon I reached Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg and walked briskly up to the pinnacle in the centre.

Of course the city panorama reminded me dimly of Wordsworth's view of London:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.*

Synagogues, churches, mosques; industrial brick buildings from the Wilhelminian epoch and building cranes and the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz; the TV Tower; tree-lined streets and the renovated façades of Kreuzberg apartment buildings along the streets named after places and generals of the Napoleonic Wars. All of these were half-immersed in a blue-grey morning haze.

Red and white tape was hung across the children's play areas. And since yesterday or the day before, it's been forbidden to sit down on the grass, and sitting on benches is only recommended for short periods.

I was one of three people who had surmounted the veined pale stone steps to the enclosure surrounding the pinnacle. Around the pinnacle itself, there was an even more silent host of beer bottles from the bacchanalian nighttime revels of neighbourhood ne'er-do-wells, standing dispersed around the steps.

And at the foot of this enclosure, a man in his forties or fifties had his little portable wheeled suitcase ('Hackenporsche' in German; I'm bad at thinking of the English-language equivalent) with him as he pottered around the waterfall, beyond the wooden fence.

But what I loved were the signs of spring. Green leaves appearing more fully formed, like salmon 'alevins' becoming recognizable fry, narcissus — always yellow and perfect large stars, fragrant hyacinths in white that had blossomed so far that they had toppled and were beginning to wither at the edges of their petals, annual golden cowslips or primroses, and violets in white that were (I thought) more funereal-looking. Little ghosts at the foot of a large tree.

After I was warmed up, I jogged for a minute or two on the way home, feeling healthy and strong and hopeful again.

* "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" [Wikipedia]

Reading a Shakespeare Sonnet on Waves and Eternity Beyond

Shakespeare's sonnets formed part of my 'emo' teenager phase, maybe not so much the sprightlier 'darling buds of May' sonnets but the ones about aging and dying.

Now the sonnets are coming to mind again, given the heightened death rates that are reported as a consequence of the coronavirus, and the grim pictures of military trucks carrying corpses in northern Italy.

It is probably still a little 'emo' to feel that the verses are apt when I'm just reading depressing news about deaths, like millions of other people have since script was first invented, not staring at the Reaper eye-to-eye.

But I guess it's fair to take comfort where one can find it.

Please forgive the crude undergraduate analysis, in advance.

***

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:

And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand.
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

***

I like the first lines because they express very well, I think, the feeling of the benign and friendly passing of time when one is not in the middle of a personal storm.

As a teenager I spent hours walking beside the ocean and hearing the lapping of the waves, which do of course have a rhythm like the second hand of a clock. Then at rare moments, seeing the waves crashing high onto the concrete breakwaters with an arctically cold wind whistling behind.

And I like the abstracted ideas that the waves are heading somewhere; that there is an 'aim'; and that they are engaged with each other as if they were colleagues or comrades.

These are comforting thoughts.

But I don't think Shakespeare delves deeply enough — cheeky though it is for me to write this — when he portrays the worst spectre of old age as losing the beauty of youth.

I should think that being more vulnerable to mental and physical illness, losing the ability or permission to carry on one's life's work, or seeing loved ones die before their time, is worse.

And age is not always cruel. I am far happier now than I was when I was a teenager, although admittedly it's too early to tell if the worm will turn. Also, looking at others: for example I think that a lifetime of tough experiences can make characters especially loving and beloved as they become older.

Age has become a large topic with the coronavirus, although perhaps gradually less so as it becomes clear that even twenty-year-olds who are otherwise healthy may become critically ill. And I'd have to reiterate that greater statistical likelihood of death should by no means devalue the worth of a human being. Perhaps I'm biased by knowing wonderful people who were well over sixty: there are many people who, at a hundred years of age, have far more left to contribute to the world than I do.

Anyway, the last two lines of the sonnet I find a bit obnoxious — even though I like the feeling that underlies them of being determined not to forget the dead —, because writers (or first-person narrators?) rarely manage to bestow immortality as much as they think they do. Taking, again, a religious standpoint; and borrowing a few metaphors from Antony and Cleopatra; I would say that the good that men do lives after them, in an abstracter form, and gradually the bad is interred with their bones. No need for human intervention.

___
Text of the sonnet taken from Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. William J. Rolfe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883), at Wikisource.

Mini-Quarantines and Mini-Ethics

It's the end of the second week of staying at home in order not to spread the coronavirus. I've been managing to sleep longer.

From a logical perspective I know that this crisis is small peas in even recent history. Also, the things that worry and disorientate me the most are signs that proper action is being taken; not of problems per se.

But because of the technological demands of switching to the home office, tasks have piled up at work and I have been putting in work on Saturdays the past two weeks.

Rather having more time to read or do housework or do other things, I have been working as much as ever, and it is definitely weird to do it at home.

It is only now, because a few urgent work tasks were tackled and I have reemerged from the first state of archetypal fight-or-flight reaction, I am beginning to realize how not all right I have been, emotionally. I think that admitting the problem is good; admittedly I'm not quite sure how to proceed from here.

Having familiar routines interrupted still seems to be traumatizing for me; and I still don't know how to handle the reversal of stimuli — the pull of the sunshine and the green spring versus the rational need to stay indoors, the wish to comfort-eat versus the shortfalls in the grocery store stocks, etc.

That said, a billion other people or more on Earth are in the same boat; I just don't want to generalize on everyone else's behalf.

Because of my anxiety I haven't been able to properly think out the broader ramifications, especially the philosophical or (in my case) specifically religious ones. From what I heard in the news yesterday, the Pope called the coronavirus crisis a punishment from God for sins like ignoring the poor and the needs of the earth. I did not find this especially inspiring.

My armchair analysis is different:

To my (hopefully not too Leibnizian) eyes: like all things, the coronavirus brings with it good and evil. This good and evil are unequally scattered now, but will in the due course of time be balanced out and resolved for the good.

Much of this will wash over us without our being able to influence much; but a portion of its effect is up to us to determine. And yet, although I am trying to become a marginally better person through this interesting experience, I have felt cornered, panicked and not nice or noble at all.

That said, I think that many secular or theological analyses are likely to be better than mine!

A Snapshot in the Age of Coronavirus

It feels as if events are happening too quickly to process them.

A week ago I'd have thought it was absurd to stay home from work, even as I washed my hands when necessary until the skin was cracked and bleeding, and tried to figure out how skin lotion could be applied antiseptically.

Now I'm working from home after weeks of debating with colleagues about the office's policy against remote work. I can't emphasize enough how bizarre this feels.

The roads below the room where I'm working are maybe a third more empty than usual — Sunday morning levels of traffic except at rush hour. With each pedestrian and cyclist whom I see I always wonder, are they really being prudent? Car music sounds louder, bird song easier to hear, the air I think a little lighter and less particle-filled, and brawling voices on the sidewalk permeate the windows more easily as do the buses and the ambulance sirens.

Going out to the grocery store does not appeal, normal though it may seem at every other time.

Firstly, I'd need to think out how to do it while keeping at a proper distance from others.

Secondly, I'm worried about seeing a William Hogarth-like picture of cupidity and greed in a city I'd felt happy in and proud of until Monday.

On Monday evening I went into the familiar chain store underneath my office. The leafy vegetables were largely vanished (lots of tomatoes remained), table sugar and flour gone, baked goods bins decimated. In the aisle that holds hygiene products, half of the shelves were bare and had paper signs taped to them that announced that supplies had temporarily run out.

At the cash register, the atmosphere was anxiety mixed with boisterousness.

Everyone was in a hurry, or in a state of giddy frivolity that made me angry, e.g. planning to buy lots of beer to drink with pals. The cashier was calm enough on the outside. But the way she was hyperaware of the indeed perturbing, loud roaring of a man near the drugstore on the other side of the street, revealed that her nerves, too, were on edge.

Later on, once I'd left the store, I almost cried because I felt that the crisis-management-by-consumption was so degrading and now began to find it sad. Then I walked home for two hours to avoid public transit.

It's strict and yet a little weak-spirited of me, but I don't want to see those grocery scenes again.

Anyway, the best consolation I've found — aside from fluffy and harmless distractions I find, and jokes — is the levelheadedness of people I know personally and of many people whom I don't, and especially the companionship of the people I like best. (Although Papa is missing.)

What I'm still trying to figure out is my duty to others, aside from staying home and not becoming a carrier of the virus. Maybe I'll also be able to sleep properly again. Lately I've been anxious enough to wake up even before 7 a.m.