Emptiness

Pioneer Square has always had its visibly homeless population, but right now, with downtown’s housed residents staying inside and weekday work crowds gone, street sleepers and shelter users are almost alone — besides those who still come downtown to help them.

--Seattle Times

 The Covid-19 epidemic has hollowed out Downtown Seattle.  Or so our newspaper says.  Since the "Stay Home" order in mid-March, I haven't been downtown.  Nor have many people. 

The buses still run, on a reduced schedule, but they are nearly empty.  Ghost buses gliding down empty streets, streets devoid of traffic.  Their destination signs lit up with the words, "Essential Trips Only."  Carrying only the few -- the very few -- passengers who do essential work, and can't work from home.  And, of course, those who watch over the homeless, the new owners of the downtown streets.

It stirs a haunting memory of the 1990 movie Europa, Europa, of the scene where the boy, secretly Jewish, travels by streetcar through the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation. The streetcar windows had been painted over, made opaque to save the passengers from the horror of observing the sights of destitution and starvation outside.

And it's not just our downtown that's hollowed out.  My life feels hollowed out as well.

I've been wondering why -- having finished reading my 1,200-page volume by Rebecca West, and having painfully distilled my wildly gyrating reactions to that book down into a few paragraphs for Monday's post -- I now feel so unable to think of any new topic worth discussing. 

The reason, of course, jumps right out at me.  When I'm not reading, I'm confronted by the pandemic.  Nothing else is happening.  I looked at the front page of today's New York Times -- every single story is in some way involved in the medical, social, economic, or political fallout from the effects of the virus.  That was true, in fact, for the entirety of the first fifteen pages, with the exception of a story on page six about a dispute between Iran and Iraq.  The New Yorker's four "editorials" -- under the title "The Talk of the Town" -- all deal with some aspect of the epidemic.  Feature articles included a lengthy biography of Dr. Anthony Fauci, an analysis of the effect of the pandemic on Wall Street, and a "humorous" feature about living through enforced isolation.

It's not that I'm not interested in the pandemic.  I gobble  up every item of news about it.  But the pandemic itself has gobbled up nearly everything else in life. 

The pandemic is all everyone thinks about and reads about.  I have nothing new to say about it.  I can write nothing about it that anyone wants to read.  The subject already has been essentially exhausted, with months to go before it's through with us.  The print media now publish little on any other subject that is capable of either exciting or infuriating me.

I'm tired of writing about long walks through beautiful, virus-fogged streets.  I'm tired of writing about my trials and joys in quests for groceries.  I have no hiking along new trails to describe, no travels in new countries to anticipate or relate.  All my lecture series, all my film series, all my concerts have been canceled: I have nothing to review, no grist for my analytical mill.  We can no longer assemble in movie houses, and I don't subscribe to Netflix.

My mind needs stimulation, desperately.  Instead, I feel as though I were wandering through  the deserted wasteland, the empty streets, of Downtown Seattle itself -- watching the sagebrush blow by..

My only hope is to read, and then to analyze and discuss what I've read.  Read any good books, lately?  I suppose I should peruse the generally useless suggestions that Amazon is so happy to offer me.  Another book review, a review of any book, would be better than another post complaining about the emptiness of life in the Kingdom of Covid-19.