Friday the 13th of March was the day I’d say I began to live in a pandemic-defined reality. Since then, I’ve watched an awful lot of television, seen many movies old and new, and read until my neck or thumb hurt, or both. Excepting The Great British Baking Show, and other British-accented escapist necessities like it, certain themes have emerged: fire and sloth.
These seem to correspond well with the crisis moment and the way it works on our nervous system—fire reflecting the “fight” response, sloth the “flight” or “freeze.” Or more charitably, our need to slow down considerably in order to tend to our frazzled nervous systems. Not even the “need” to slow down, perhaps, so much as the way the gears of the world ground to a halt.
First, the instances of fire:
When I needed to be engrossed by something in order to put aside the ball of rage-fear-grief, I turned to Little Fires Everywhere. (I hoped it might be a kind of emotional-aesthetic sequel to Big Little Lies, and on that point I think it delivered well.) I’d read Celeste Ng’s book, but how beautiful was its translation to screen! Kerry Washington’s steady, controlled fury and Reese Witherspoon’s saccharine-to-scorching temper crackled. And they kept working those titular fires in—yes, to the opening credits sequence, but also by starting the miniseries with a glimpse of the grand inferno waiting for us at the story’s chronological end, and foreshadowing it with Mia (Kerry Washington) singeing her photographs while making a process-based art piece.
At the same time, I had joined a quarantine book club with some friends, and we were reading Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson. It’s a novel about an underachieving woman in Tennessee in the nineteen-nineties who is tasked with caring for—and containing—a senator’s twin children who he fears will ruin his political career with their mysterious habit of spontaneously combusting.
Winter was burning off, very slowly, into spring, and I burned yard trimmings in a fire bowl. I lit my gas fireplace. I hygge-d with pine-scented candles.
The world was metaphorically on fire. A pandemic was spreading like wildfire. And yet the result for many, many people outside of frontline and essential workers was a forced sloth … that is, until the next wave of fires, metaphorical and literal, that would be set around the country in June after the death of George Floyd (and Breonna Taylor. And Ahmaud Arbery. And. And.). The fire became metaphor for the uncontainable and irresolvable. For what sparks are produced by the friction of suppression.
When I needed to be soothed more than ensnared, I picked Jane Eyre up off the shelf and thought, “Why not?” Maybe it would be like the Great British Baking Show. It was not. Jane Eyre is an incredible combination of melodrama and mundanity, with plot twists galore as well as pages of unbroken monologic speaking from the characters, and infinite descriptions of inclement weather. Dear Reader, if you know the tale at all, you know it reaches its zenith with a shocking fire. But fire is present and significant throughout. The “big” fire is foreshadowed by an arson attempt much earlier in the book. Fires in the hearth function to tell us about the characters (their size and quality a reflection of money, mood, and housekeeping) and often literally make the difference between health and life-threatening damp and chill. Jane, like Kevin Wilson’s twins, and maybe like some of the characters in Little Fires Everywhere, struggles with dangerous—combustible—passions which she must learn to manage in order to survive and to be true to her principles.
Though Jane Eyre is a huge novel that takes up space with a proud righteousness, Jane, our moral heroine, clearly rejects the idea that we must aim for a huge life. One of her personal victories, in fact, is rejecting the opportunity to do what is billed as “more good” for the world by joining her cousin as a missionary worker. She chooses love instead. A small and slow life is just fine for her. Moreover, she sees divinity in the good she can do in forming and caring for her family.
So much became “slow” during the pandemic—except of course its spread. If you wanted to avoid going to the store at all, or at least any more than necessary, you had to eschew running out any time you wanted something. Many were even forced into slowness by the unaviliabliy of quick deliveries from the usual Amazon and grocery delivery options. If you weren’t in an emergency personally, however, there could be a pleasant permission to not solve all your problems or meet all your desires at once. It dovetails with slow food, slow fashion, slow parenting.
I tore through Nothing to See Here in a few days, it moved so quickly and was a pleasure. But a large part of the pleasure of Jane Eyre was having, out of necessity, a slow read. Not as slow as I feared, though! With so little else on my calendar, I’d sometimes read fifty pages in a day. But the sentences are long, the language thick and high (full of words that I once knew well from my GRE flashcards). There was no fear of running out of story, of being left bereft too soon. It was all deep water, and the sun was always high in the sky. Nearly everything was worthy of observation, even if it did not “advance the narrative” of the central story. I kept imagining what the contemporary literary editor would say, how much they’d suggest could be cut from the novel without losing anything!
Sloth offers us a chance to do more observation. In the forced slowness of my weeks in wintry “pause,” I observed Every. Darn. Phase. of the sprouting of the maple leaves. I’d truly never noticed the clusters of flowers that preceded the leaves, or that the leaves themselves began so cute and tiny.
It looks like I’ll be continuing on the path of contemplative pleasures. On my actively-reading stack right now are other “slow” seeming books I’ve found myself wallowing happily in: Sprout Lands and Gossamer Days and How to Do Nothing — none of which I have finished yet.
