The other day, one of my colleagues who had just come back from a holiday in Italy was asked to go home and stay there for a couple of weeks. Nothing special about that: just one of a number of sensible precautionary measures taken by the University, among other institutions.
On the one hand, university life does not take too kindly to staying put. Peregrinatio academica, or what we today call ‘educational mobility’, has been part of the scholarly life since medieval times. On the other, the precautionary measures make St Jeromes of us. To be locked up with your books, though probably not with a lion, is a well-paved route to knowledge and enlightenment.
My point is that there is a redemptive element to the epidemic – or should I say to some of the social outcomes of the epidemic. Coronavirus can be good for you, especially if you’re asked to or choose to stay at home. My reasoning has nothing to do with laziness or agoraphobia. It has everything to do with the intrinsic value of staying at home.
Let’s leave aside the environmental argument. Times of Malta reported that hundreds of athletes who were coming to Malta for the marathon have now cancelled their flights. Surely a silver lining there somewhere, because the sustainability of flying around the world to run has to be rather dubious.
If we accept that mobility comes at a high environmental price, we must accept that stasis brings environmental dividends.
Still, carbon is not my main preoccupation. What I have in mind is rather that quarantine, imposed or otherwise, can be seen as a golden opportunity. You could think of it as the absence of experience, but equally as the presence of a different kind of experience. As I sit at home writing this, I find myself doubly inspired.
The first source of inspiration is the spiritual way of the Carthusian Order, which I know through two sources: Philip Gröning’s 2005 film Into Great Silence, and Tim Peeters’ 2015 book When Silence Speaks.
Incidentally, both the film and the book offer an agreeable way of spending coronavirus quarantine time.
Quarantine, imposed or otherwise, can be seen as a golden opportunity
No one does silence and solitude quite like the Carthusians. The origins of the Order go back to 1084, when Bruno of Cologne and six companions “entered the desert” (as Peeters puts it) of the Chartreuse. A metaphorical desert, because the Chartreuse massif is in fact a mountain range; also a telling metaphor, however, since the whole idea of the Carthusian spiritual way is based on silence and isolation.
Carthusians choose to live their entire lives within three concentric rings of isolation. The outer ring (the ‘desert’) is provided by the remoteness of the location; the middle by the walls of the fortress-like monasteries; and the inner by the walls of the solitary cells where the hermit-monks live, pray and contemplate in silence.
On the face of it an extreme case of self-quarantine, then. Maybe, but there’s method to the harshness. While the Carthusian way of life may not amount to much by way of pastoral service, to the people who believe in and live it, it offers a sublime experience of God. Their monasteries make the case for the value of isolation and renunciation.
My second source of inspiration is still life painting. Admittedly there are many exceptions, but the best still life tends to involve subjects – usually fruit or flowers or inanimate objects – that are indoors, and that renounce mobility and action. Perhaps it is not surprising that the artist behind some of the most intense still lifes ever painted, Juan Sánchez Cotán, was himself a Carthusian.
Still life invites us to get off the bus, so to speak. It presents a world in which perfectly mundane stuff – things like a cabbage and a melon on a shelf, in Cotán’s work – takes on a mystical quality. If the hardest thing to see is what is really there, still life is an antidote. Its way of seeing transforms the monotonous into the magical. Through the lens of still life, the simplest of everyday objects about the house become very special indeed.
Now I know that most of us who will likely have to stay at home in the coming weeks will not experience the sublime presence of God. Nor will we paint still life masterpieces. Still, it’s the idea that counts.
It’s one of the ironies of contemporary life that, even as cookbooks and kitchen toys make the bestseller lists, people cook less and less.
Another is that, in an age of interior design porn and home deco showrooms by the score, people appear to find staying at home a kind of torture – so much so that to get out more is a byword for getting a life.
Now’s our chance to discover the beautiful opposite. The University precautions prescribe 14 days of house arrest. That’s enough time to look long and hard and carefully at the melon and cabbage on your shelf, and to observe the way the light catches them. Maybe to pray, if you’re so inclined, or to finish a novel or watch a film twice.
Someone once wrote of the confined life that it resembled a dusty country road – beneath the surface of which flowed a hidden crystalline underground stream.