"And just two men, locked in a hut for six months of dark and cold, would probably kill each other, he concluded."

"So it would have to be one person alone. As the leader of the expedition, he felt obliged to assign himself to the job.... Once the sun set, on April 12, he would be stuck. No plane could fly in again until the sun returned in October.... Byrd at first took comfort in his routine of weather observations and in constantly rearranging his supply closets.... His cabin was buried in the snow, to present a low profile to the wind; the only way out was through a hatch in the roof.... On the page, Byrd’s voice cries out like the merciless Antarctic wind. He sits in his sleeping bag playing solitaire. He bangs around in the dark, fetching food and fuel from his storage tunnels.... He registers the ice crawling up the inside walls of his cabin, and the drifts of snow that cover him whenever he manages to lift the hatch to peer out at the weather and tend his instruments. Weakened by the carbon-monoxide fumes from his stove, he throws up most of his food. He stares at sleeping pills and wonders if he should take them. 'The dark side of man’s mind seems to be a sort of antenna tuned to catch gloomy thoughts from all directions,' he wrote of a particularly bitter day early in June. 'I found it so with mine.'"

From "Self-Isolated at the End of the World/Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing" (NYT).

"It was only natural for me to document my experience. I decided to map the four walls I was confined in and see where that took me creatively."

Said Gareth Fuller, quoted in "What happens when a map artist goes into quarantine" (CNN). Go to the link to see both his very elaborate artwork depicting cities and his cartoon-style mapping of his own little place. Both levels of art are good, and it resonates with me because it fits my favorite abstract category big and small.

"More than two thousand episodes [of Desert Island Discs] are available online as downloads or podcasts..."

"... and I began listening to them a few years ago, as a way of glimpsing times other than my own. I love hearing about the path-altering memories of others—what it was like to experience Beatlemania or Motown or punk before they were settled narratives. At first, I was drawn to specific guests, hoping to learn more about the interiority of David Beckham (the Stone Roses, Elton John, Sidney Bechet), what kind of music Zadie Smith liked (Biggie, Prince, Madonna), where the cultural theorist Stuart Hall found inspiration (Bach, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley—'the sound that saved a lot of second-generation black West Indian kids from just, you know, falling through a hole in the ground').... It’s come to seem less like a show about music and creative inspiration than one about the possibility of loneliness. How do you find meaning in total isolation?... As many people prepare for weeks of 'social distancing' and working from home, we return to comforts.... It never occurred to me, until fairly recently, that this exercise was different from merely naming your favorite songs, or what you considered to be the best.... I didn’t realize that the desert-island choices were really a question about mortality.... What would it mean to survive and find yourself alone (Pharoah Sanders)? Would you bask in memories of friendship (the Beach Boys) and good times (Derrick May), of your greatest love (the Intruders)? Would those memories be too painful? Maybe you would want to listen to music that existed free of context—the last splendid and uplifting thing you heard before getting lost, a reminder that the world goes on without you?"

From "Join Me in My Obsession with 'Desert Island Discs'" by Hua Hsu (in The New Yorker). Go here for the shows.

ADDED: To be clear: "It’s an interview show with a simple premise: each celebrity guest discusses the eight recordings that he or she would bring if cast away alone on a desert island." Just 8 songs. Not albums.

"My wife got [a print of a boy on a horse asking, 'What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said?' to which the horse replies, 'Help'] for my birthday, and of all the things that we have..."

"... it’s the thing that I cherish quite a bit. It’s the only thing I pass when I leave my bedroom every day when I’m home. And it’s a reminder that strength is not necessarily being physically strong, but it’s asking for help, to be vulnerable, to be the person that I’m not supposed to be, right? And that’s not necessarily a bad thing."

Item #2 on a list of 10 "essential" things in "David Chang Loves Beethoven’s Ninth (but Won’t Finish ‘Infinite Jest’)/The chef, author and television personality, whose second season of 'Ugly Delicious' just arrived on Netflix, also puts a baby monitor, the Bhagavad Gita and 'Gattaca' on his list of essentials" (NYT).

I've been thinking, in this time of forced seclusion, about what it means to help. You can't be helping in person — unless you have a special medical or other relevant in-person service to provide. And most of us can help by just withdrawing and staying out of (literal) touch in the way that might, in normal times, seem churlish or cold. But beyond the negative help of not becoming part of the problem — not spreading the disease or becoming a consumer of medical resources — you can help. You can help by preserving and sharing whatever good thoughts you have that will make it easier for other people to accept and even to prosper within their seclusion.

I'm trying to do that, and I'm also going to push back when I see people who are not helping. I'm not shunning negativity altogether, but I'm trying to use a light touch. You can assume that when I say something like "Is Fox News helping?" (in the comments thread to yesterday's post about Trish Regan), I mean serious criticism of them for stirring up ridiculous unhelpful resistance to the needed social distancing. Ousting Trish Regan for her really stupid, flat-footed nonsense is the least they could do, and I suspect they only did it because it wasn't helpful to them. But I'd say the only reason Regan could be as stupid as she was is that it wasn't that far out of line with the general environment at Fox.

And that's not to say that the other cable news networks are helping. They seem to be trying to keep hating Trump, using any material he gives them, and every day, there's always something. I want them to make common cause with him and help. It's more important than their ratings and it's more important than who wins the next election. It's time to help.

But back to David Chang and the horse that bravely said "Help." Chang likes the idea of strength in terms of vulnerability — of seeing yourself as the one who needs help. I'm pondering how that balances with what I've been thinking about help: We need to be thinking how can I help. It's not inconsistent. Wondering how you can help is different from going about intending to help. What makes you think you're a fountain of help? Your "help" may have negative value. Seeing yourself as the one who needs help is better than imagining yourself as a giver of help when you are not helping.

First, help yourself. That's the #1 form that your helping can take. Next, quit "helping" with help that is not helpful! Use your time of forced seclusion to contemplate what it means to help others. Do you need some help with that?

"Mid-morning and still no new Althouse post. I'm beginning to feel isolated."

Said Sebastian at 8:52 a.m. in last night's café... which was just as I was finally getting around to working up a post — published, below, at 8:58.

It wasn't just a matter of needing to get out to see the moon refuse to set...



It was also the news itself. I was reading around in my usual manner and not finding anything suitable (not until that one thing you see below). There's a great deal about the coronavirus, but I'm not just doing news updates here, I don't repeat things I've already done, and there's the ineffable feeling of blogginess, without which I won't blog. Please consider the absence of posts in that light.

Sebastian's comment struck me, because it's either sad or funny. We are taking on isolation, and, in fact, one of the articles I read this morning and rejected as non-bloggable was something about how going on line and engaging with social media would not work in the context of isolation taken on in response to coronavirus. It felt concocted out of old material about how social media isn't a good enough substitute for in-the-flesh relationships. Just add coronavirus, and you've got another coronavirus article. I'm not a vector for that.

Anyway, good morning.

"[W]hen Hurricane Irene devastated my state, Vermont, in 2011, people turned out within hours, bringing tools from backhoes to brooms."

"They mucked out basements and rebuilt driveways, and they kept coming back for weeks, until the job was done. They did it for strangers, mostly—although they didn’t remain strangers for long. But, with coronavirus, none of that is possible. There’s little way to be of use except to disappear inside your home, so that you can’t infect anyone. Indeed, even the places we gather for solace are increasingly off limits. Churches.... Schools....  sports...  We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse.... If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best."

From "With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People" by Bill McKibben (in The New Yorker).

There is the forced isolation of social distancing, and there is the isolation we choose for ourselves. During the forced isolation, we can reflect on the good and the bad of our chosen isolation. I don't agree with the implication that because we are "socially evolved primates," the meaning of life is to socialize. There is great value in solitude and in life within marriage and within a family. But this is a time to reflect on what really matters, and in addition to the trouble and pain, we may experience deeper benefits.

As we protect ourselves and others through this isolation, we should be thinking about how we can help. We can't help but going about ministering to others. And we need to help by doing what we can to avoid being among those who need medical care or cause anyone else to need medical care. Don't be part of the physical problem. But we can also help by using this time not to agonize and stir each other up but to preserve and refine our mind and our soul.

"The tricky thing is that social distancing works best when done preventatively, before things get really bad..."

"... says [Lori Uscher-Pines, a senior health-policy researcher at the RAND Corporation]. But there are downsides, too — canceled events mean lost money (and sometimes lost jobs), and self-isolation can be hard on one’s mental health. For that reason, says Uscher-Pines, many public-health officials find it challenging to decide when to instate social-distancing regulations.... 'If you are personally concerned about COVID-19, you should try to limit your contact and exposure to crowded places, and try to maintain a distance of three to six feet [from other people],' she says.... Err on the side of a liberal interpretation, when possible — for instance, if (and when) schools close, keep kids away from their classmates outside the school building too. 'A big concern with something like school closure is that school will be closed, but then kids will mix on their own outside of school, and that kind of defeats the purpose,' she adds."

From "What Does ‘Social Distancing’ Really Mean?" (New York Magazine).

ADDED: The term "social distancing" is not familiar enough for me to feel comfortable using it in explaining why I'm not doing something. When I wrote an email to cancel an appointment just now, I referred to what I'm doing as "taking a 'social distancing' approach," and I thought that sounded rude and changed it to "taking a 'self-isolating' approach." That's more I'm doing this to myself and less I'm doing this to you.

"The coronavirus is putting remote work to a gigantic test, and at a totally unprecedented scale."

"Throughout China, Italy, Japan and South Korea, workers have been on lockdown. Last week, the same happened in Seattle. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all told employees there to remain home.... In fact, remote work isn't always possible. Fewer than half could do so at least some of the time, according to one Gallup survey. Hourly workers don't get paid if they don't work, and those in retail, manufacturing, or health care usually must be physically present to work.... 'I don't believe people are as productive at home'...."

From "Laundry Between Emails: Working From Home Goes Viral In The Time Of Coronavirus" (NPR).