When Covid-19 visibly broke out in the U.S. in February 2020, we were—all of us, in our different ways—in a state of confusion. Even though we had been warned for years by epidemiologists about pandemics, and even though the world had seen recent scary infectious viruses like the SARS epidemic in China in 2002-2004 and various outbreaks of Ebola, we seemed unprepared for the worldwide onslaught of Covid-19. (That appears to be our general state: easier to coast along in delusory comforts than to take threats seriously.) In early March I left Chicago to join my beloved in New York City for what I thought would be my spring break from teaching. Already, in March, travel was difficult: I took an overnight train, heavily masked. After a few days in New York it became clear that I wouldn’t return for the spring quarter at the University of Chicago: schools were closing, teaching was lurching online.
My beloved and I retreated to his rough cabin in the Catskill mountains, not supposing that our retreat would last almost two years. In those first months of the pandemic, with no vaccine in sight and furious political battles tearing the country to pieces, we huddled in the woods, venturing out to forage for food at a store twenty miles away only once a month: a time of washing every piece of fruit, every jar, every carrot, head of cabbage, or celery stalk once we lugged them into the house. A time of listening anxiously to the news on the radio. A time of keeping in touch with children and grandchildren and siblings by phone, of calming ourselves by walking in the forest, of securing email through a hotspot and trying to carry on with our work, not knowing how many would die or how the disease was spreading.
What was clear was that it was spreading fast: corpses were piling up in trucks because the morgues were full. Death tolls were soaring. Citizens attacked citizens. In this monstrous time, in a medical but also a political catastrophe with insane remedies being proposed—Inject bleach! Take hydroxychloroquine!—I turned for perspective to Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. I had last read this work in adolescence, and I remembered most dramatically the Greek historian’s account of the plague in Athens and its effect on civil life: the proliferation of lies, the turning of words inside out. Honor now meant dishonor; loyalty meant treason; knowledge meant delusion.
For weeks I struggled to translate my panic and sorrow into poetry, and failed. Everything was too dangerous, too extreme, for the cadences, the vocabulary, the shapes of feeling I was accustomed to worry into poems. But reading The Peloponnesian War, I found my way. My country was being smashed, or smashing itself, somewhat as Athens had been smashed, so I smashed Thucydides’ sentences. I plucked whole phrases from his account and embedded them as shards in my poem. The title comes right from his text. His description of the plague lay like a tracing over my sense of what was happening to us. It gave not comfort, but clarity. And once I had that vision, I gathered my strength and wrote the poems that became the book Hindsight. It’s a book of mourning, stock-taking, and conscience. I thank Thucydides.
