Happy Friday!
I’m Cassie Werber, a reporter in London, writing on one of the first really beautiful days of the year. Still-cold air is laced with a fresh green scent and the sound of pigeons burring. Blossom is falling from the urban trees.
It’s also the early days of my family’s near-complete isolation: My partner and I working from home alongside our two-year-old, in a country on lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. So far, the parks that form Londoners’ connection with the outdoors are still open—but that may have a time limit.
Spring. We were all set to burst forth in a celebration of cleaning, exercise, new wardrobe items, new haircuts. We were going to drink rosé on just-too-chilly terraces. We were going to run with our children through fields of flowers. It’s hard to let go of that imagined awakening. What will sustain us through this, the strangest of global seasons? I think it might be surrendering to a transition that’s more minute and much, much slower.
A subtler spring. Over the last few years there has been lots of Instagrammable, aspirational talk about slowing down: Me time, mindfulness, taking a breath. But this is so much more profound. This is the cancelling of every quick dinner, every work social, every I-can-just-fit-this-in arrangement. It’s not “a night in with Netflix,” it’s months in, and possibly more. If dread of the virus and its longterm effects is the topsoil of our angst, the next layer down is terror of boredom and confinement. The imperative to look at our space and say, this is what I have, and only this. But within that lies the seed of something beautiful.
Music and silence. A confession: Music scares me. I love to dance and listen, but when discussing or even thinking about music I’ve always felt like a know-nothing among experts. This was especially acute when, as a teenager, music knowledge seemed to be the main currency of cool. And now here is the big, quiet vacuum created by quarantine.
A couple of years ago I started to chip away at the fear via piano lessons from my friend Llywelyn Ap Myrddin, a classical composer and member of the band PREP. Gradually the black dots and lines of sheet music began to connect to something real, a sound in the world. With this season rioting around our stillness, I decided to listen to The Rite of Spring, a 1913 experimental ballet by Igor Stravinsky (above, Béjart Ballet performs it in 2013).
The work is an aural challenge, not relaxing zone-out music, but Llywelyn suggested I put it on in the background as a way of getting used to the sound. I certainly takes some getting used to. (When the ballet was first staged in Paris, one of its principal dancers told the BBC, it was hard for the performers to hear the orchestra because the audience was in vocal uproar at just how weird it was.) I listen to it while doing yoga, while looking after my son, while working from home, and the strange, discordant melodies keep making me jump. One night, once my unconscious has soaked up the sounds, I’ll sit down with a bowl of soup and listen to the whole thing.
I would never have persisted if it wasn’t for the necessity of isolation, which reframes time at home as a space not just for downtime, but for creativity. It might take the form of painting a room, or making a photograph album. It might be sharpening that set of drawing pencils: because you have them, and the strange luxury of nowhere else to be.
Dig in. The parks have never felt more important. London is a surprisingly lush place, with 47% of the city made up of “green.” As well as the huge and famous parks right in the centre—Regents Park, containing London Zoo; Hyde Park, where you can ride horses and swim in the Serpentine lake—there are other great swathes, like wilder Hampstead Heath and enormous Richmond Park with its herds of deer. But every borough also has its green spaces. Within an easy walk of my home there are three, two of them big enough for decent lap running, with mature trees.
Now we may have to bring the green in. This week I planted tomato seeds and basil on the kitchen windowsill. Outside in pots: nasturtiums, hollyhocks, radishes, and lettuce. (We have a small garden, for which I’m wildly grateful.) Seeds, pots, and compost are available online, and planting can’t help but make you hopeful: To see shoots emerging from the black earth; to know that your nurture made it happen.
My friend (and former Quartz culture editor) Indrani Sen is a keen gardener at home in New York. “I think for the greatest ratio of joy to effort, you get the most out of greens and herbs. (If you’re doing windowsills only, stick with herbs.)” She said by email. “They’re super easy to grow, and being able to just pick yourself a salad or garnish as you cook is an amazing luxury. I always plant a lot of kale, plus arugula, chard, spinach, basil for pesto, cilantro, parsley … But my gateways to gardening were kale and basil.”
Escape to the past. At a time when we’re inundated with technical and terrifying reporting, novels have never felt more necessary. Music and Silence, by the extraordinary Rose Tremain, is set in the Danish court in 1629. It’s a perfect antidote to the here and now yet also feels relatable, prescient. I’ve just taken delivery of The Mirror and the Light, the last in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, an advisor to King Henry VIII. (The first two both won the Booker Prize.) We should all be mindful of asking delivery drivers to keep working during lockdown. But each of us has to judge whether a book—or basil seeds, or baking yeast—is the thing that will truly sustain us.
Have a great weekend!
Insomnia is a common side-effect of heightened worry and restricted exercise. My ritual for sleeplessness is to leave the bedroom, drink a glass of milk, and read cookery books. They’re non-narrative, so can’t suck you in, and the worst surprise they’re ever going to hold is a complicated recipe involving things you can’t get under lockdown. Recently my go-to is A Modern Way to Cook by Anna Jones for its seasonal vegetable focus and soothing lists.