There are aerial photographs of my part of North London, a place called Muswell Hill, which is a plateau overlooking the city where on a clear day you can see sixty-five miles across to the South Downs. From the air, my patch looks like a rainforest: a dense green sward surrounded by grey concrete sprawl. There is a well-tended public park ten yards from my front door with all the amenities of our lucky life: playground, restaurant, sports field, winding broad paths through an ancient wood which long ago was a Roman encampment.
At the bottom of my garden, however, just beyond the fish pond and the iron gate which leads out to it, is fifty-two acres of woodland on which nothing can be built. This park, now called Queen’s Wood, forms a sort of cordon of silence around the houses which abut onto it; nonetheless it has an unmistakable immanence of hauntedness. The spot was formerly a plague pit. The gnarly trees, the sloping crepuscular unkept paths, the absence of clearings in the thick forest lend it a distinct whiff of melancholy. As a metaphor, the geography seems to pinpoint not just where I am, but where, metaphysically speaking, we all are under lockdown: at once haunted by the palpable presence of death and the palpable absence of life.
“The face of London was now indeed strangely altered,” Daniel Defoe wrote in A Journal of the Plague Year, 1665, where “tears and lamentation were seen almost in every house…and sorrow and sadness sat upon every face.” In our Plague Year, the terror is real, but the lamentation is filtered mostly through screens. We keep score of the infected and the dead; unlike Defoe, however, we don’t see them at every corner yet. We can escape the daily horror around us with a flick of the switch. It is not just our lives which have been stalled but also the civilizing hurly-burly of city living. “Civilization” has its root in the word for “city.” To be required to keep your distance—two meters—and to self-isolate (one walk per day), albeit necessary, is to eliminate at a stroke the element which civilizes: the hubbub of interaction, the rubbing together of diverse cultures. London’s vacant cityscape makes the point at a glance: we are ghosts of ourselves living in a ghost town. If we connect these days, we do it virtually: we are present absences.
Of all the required abdications—travel, restaurants, gyms, sports, shops, community—the most defining for me is the closing of London’s theatres. In England, over the centuries, theatre is traditionally where the society comes to think, to dream, to remember. It is the pulse of the nation. (London’s theatres closed on March 20 by governmental order, literally fifteen minutes before I pitched up in the West End to see Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, ironically a comedy about death and a ghost.) Theatre makes a spectacle of presence: the actors and the audience at once feed off and enliven each other. Deprived of levity, illumination, provocation, engagement which add such flavor to life, I’m thrust back into the silence of my rooms and the arena of my own imaginings.
Catastrophe has required a radical revision in the scheme of things. The enforced silence which is healing the atmosphere may also somehow help us. In art, you need shadow to show brilliance; the long shadow of the pandemic has flushed out into the open something which our busy cosmopolitan gaze often overlooks: the miraculous in the everyday.
The thought came to me as I was hard at my new chore—house cleaning. I enjoy the job. In our nightmarish moment, housework feels almost defiant: a gesture of order in the face of Nature’s anarchy. Silence and Time are our new abundance. There is no there, at present, just here. Rather like a brass rubbing, all the scrubbing, dusting, mopping, vacuuming deepens the outline of here, right now, with the objects my wife and I have put around the house and in the garden down the decades to define us. Housework, which I thought was just a routine, has become an act of rediscovery, a way paying better attention to the available world. Although the West End is off-limits, there is a whole comic extravaganza going on in the bushes just above the glass roof of the conservatory where I vacuum. The nervy finches and chuffs, in their radiant swiftness, are all levity as they swoop down on the feeder, another object I never had time to notice.
I wipe the conservatory ledge and lift up two large pine cones, taken from behind a gated community in Reno, Nevada, where twenty-five years ago we tossed Mother’s ashes into a gusty northwest wind. The weight of the large cones in my hand calls to mind my gathered family under the towering pine, the planting of raspberries in the sandy earth. And then—something unbidden and almost forgotten—Mom’s smile. Almost every dusted object, the ice-fishing trout decoy, the wooden rabbit with one ear, the Thai seashell used in a rollicking swimming game with my granddaughter, holds a story and a feeling. The closer I look, the more a disremembered past comes alive.
I step outside to empty the whisk pan. The wind feels luscious against my face, that organ I’m not supposed to touch; the leaves rustle and their shadows release a new palette of color from the garden flowers. Birdsong, which I hardly registered as I bustled through my days, now fills silence with ravishing sound.
When my chores are over, I sit at the bottom of the garden, watching the goldfish as they glide in their aimless orange ballet. I can make out the plague pit through the bamboo fencing. “People were terrified by the force of their own imagination,” Defoe wrote of London’s panic back in the day. Our panic is different but just as petrifying. But fear is not our only reality. If we must challenge ourselves to shelter in place for the time being, we must also challenge ourselves not to lose joy in place. As the saying commands on the embroidered tapestry near my study: “You, whose day it is, make it beautiful.”
