Saving Lives By Doing Absolutely Nothing Is My Best Achievement Yet

I entered quarantine for COVID-19 six months ago today and haven’t left it since. In fact, I haven’t left the chair in which I currently sit. It has wheels, so I can get around my Mount Winchester estate fairly easily. As I watch the world broil outside my louvered parapet windows, I realize I’ve given up nothing, and everything.

For certain, I locked down a little early for a reluctant American, but I’ve always been ahead of the flattened curve, like when I called for the invasion of Iraq in March 2002, and when I published “In Defense of Phrenology” in The New Republic during my two-week tenure at the helm of that magazine in 1996.

I’m also no stranger to isolation. The Japanese held me prisoner at Corregidor for four months in 1942, finally releasing me because they couldn’t stand the prose poems I was writing about them. In 1960, I moldered for six solitary weeks in Siberia after the Soviets shot down my spy plane.

Plus, I once spent a week in Belgium, and I once had a conversation with Jonathan Franzen. So I’m no stranger to the banality of cloistered suffering.