I got an email yesterday from the academic in England I wrote about earlier, the one who thought he might have COVID 19. We’d been going back and forth about a monograph he’d written when he told me pretty casually that both he and his wife were showing symptoms of the virus. His daughter is a nurse and had already tested positive.

Afterward, silence. Since he’s an older gentleman, I was worried. But yesterday, this arrived:

“Hello Lesley,

“Sorry for delay but have been in hospital with bad bout of Covid-19! Was touch and go so has damped my ardour to rush into print. Seeing people in the bed next door dying gives one a different perspective.

“Any way would just like to thank you for your interest in my miserable efforts and wish you every success for the future. My wife and daughter are fine and  looking after me as I make a slow recovery at home.

“With every good wish…”

A relief that he made it. But between the lines is something most writers I know are fixating on: the value of writing during the pandemic.

Not to mention our ability to do so. 

The theory is, even though the lockdown is starting to ease in many places—for now—we have endless amounts of time. Writers can churn out new novels and memoirs. We can all put up our feet and read books we’ve been planning to read for years.

It turns out not. I recently spoke with one writer who has a couple of young children. She said she doesn’t have time to write and knows she won’t until the lockdown ends. Another writer with kids said she insists on writing for half an hour every morning. It keeps her sane, although she says she has no idea if what she’s writing is any good at all.

Of course, there are also writers who say they’re writing very quickly and fluently. Some say they’re tough, accustomed to solitude, used to being self-starters. Others agree, but wonder whether their work will seem irrelevant in a post-pandemic world.  

Pre-all-this, I was the type of writer who would put my head down and write for eight straight hours, at least when I had a day free of paid work and family obligations. I needed that much time to feel I’d accomplished anything. Not that I sat still, being a pacer. I wore a Fitbit for a while, and found that my pacing extended to several thousand steps a day. Some of those days were productive, some weren’t. But that’s how I wrote for years.

Now, lacking both paid work and young children, I could write eight hours a day, every day. Yet I find I have the emotional energy to manage four, maybe four-and-a-half hours. After that, the tank is empty.

Of course, it’s a convenient way to work. I tell myself, ‘Look at all the time that leaves for other things.’ Chores, cooking, yoga, watching films, especially reading.

Yet the tank is pretty empty on the reading front, too.

Since the lockdown started, I’ve found I can only read short snatches of a book before looking away to think about…whatever. Best-case scenario, the book makes me remember something and sets off a ping. ‘Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve never thought about the connection between X and Y.’ 

More often it’s just meaningless brain noise. ‘I have to remember to pick up some grapes next time I’m at the store.’ ‘Did I say I’d get back to her today or tomorrow?’’ 

In fact, my distractibility goes beyond that. Usually I pick up one book at a time and either read it through or put it aside quickly and brutally. These days I move among several books at once, barely starting one before beginning another, reading a chapter of this, a chapter of that, skipping to the end of the fourth one to find out what happens. 

This can set up other interesting resonances. One of the books I’ve been reading is Mark Bourrie’s biography, Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. Another is the final volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light. The two of them bounce off each other in ways that maybe I’ll write about later. 

But that doesn’t happen very often. It would be nice, but usually there’s no value in what I’m doing at all.

Psychologists say it’s natural to feel unfocused during a crisis, and that we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves. We don’t have to do more than we need to do to get through the day. When Roseanne Cash tweeted a reminder that Shakespeare wrote King Lear under quarantine, the shrinks piled in to chide her. (I like the word chide. Although I doubt Roseanne Cash liked being so voluminously chided.) 

The weird thing is, I’m not consciously anxious about the virus or the economy or the fact the world is going all to hell. None of the anxiety attacks some people report, no inner chitter of worry. 

But I’m behaving differently. I’m not quite myself. Which is interesting to watch. 

I often tell students that writers need to learn to walk around with a homunculus sitting on our shoulders. Or if you want to go mechanical, a camera. In either case, we as writers live our lives, and the homunculus-slash-camera observes what we see, noting down the peculiar bend of a tree branch, a snatch of conversation, a glimpse of odd behaviour.

More importantly, the camera observes us. What do we think and feel about that? What does it make us remember? How do we behave?

I once talked about this with the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. He told me that he goes to the zoo to observe the way animals move. Since we’re animals, observing them helps him create characters. He also said that one time, when he was in terrible pain, he noticed the peculiar way he hunched his shoulders. Even while in agony, he said to himself, ‘I can use that.”

It’s all material. We’re material for our work. 

I don’t know what use I’m going to make of the pandemic, nor of my distracted behaviour during it. But thinking about it makes me circle back to the British academic and his hesitations. Does what I’m writing lately have any value at all? In the bed beside Great Death.

I have to think so or I’m not sure I could keep going. I tell myself that art is a shout against the inhuman. More than that: it’s an insistence on being human. Maybe I’m too distracted right now for my work to be very good. But being human implies being imperfect, so maybe that’s allowed.