The prevailing mood is a desire for a return to normality. We miss life of the kind we had, a fabric of existence of which we seem to have the better measure now than when we were enmeshed in it.
By definition, nostalgia is a yearning for things past. I don’t know if there’s a name for this, but after several weeks in quarantine, I find myself nostalgic for the future. I experience it as longing mixed with anticipation, as reminiscence intensified with exploration. It is a quest for a prospect, a destination. The need to believe in an Ithaca waiting at the other end of these extraordinary times.
No matter how orderly we plan our lives, uncertainty about tomorrow is all we can be sure of, and it is often crises that remind us of this fundamentally inherent clause to the human condition. When the coronavirus turned up, I pictured its arrival as a storm interrupting my sail. Within a matter of days, we coiled down an unpredictable path that left us spinning and shaking, the changes so many, rapid and unexpected, it was difficult to make them out or keep up with them. I might have had the instinct to close my eyes and reopen them again when it was all over.
The confusion insinuated itself in the flow of my work and mental life. Every day I proceeded with determination to carry on, only to have my thoughts muddled by a blurriness to my mind. I was restless. Part of me thought a routine structure was all I needed. But while I strived to stick to tasks and goals pre-pandemic, it was impossible to ignore a need to try and make sense of what was going on across the world, let alone remain unperturbed by the superimposition of unsettling emotions. Fear. Anxiety. And especially grief. A knot has tightened in my throat and tears have gone down my cheeks in the face of the wide unrelenting loss.
After two months in lockdown, emotions are still ripe, but my body and mind have slowly adapted to the regime of prolonged isolation and to a new way of living that feels kind of crystallised. We are moving forward as best we can in an otherwise global state of immobilisation. While I would love to be able to have friends over for dinner, travel or go to a crowded music concert, among other things, I am less impatient than I was at the beginning of the outbreak. I take one day at a time.
Thinking of the idea of Ithaca and re-reading the eponymous poem by the Greek poet Constantinos Cavafy has helped me gain some perspective and cope better with uncertainty and the continued waiting. The Covid-19 crisis is a tempest in what is our life odyssey and Ithaca is the home we wish to return to individually and collectively, so familiar and yet seemingly distant, hazy and unattainable.
Within the notion of human wandering hides the word odyne which is Greek for pain. The trajectory toward the realisation of our wishes is often punctuated with challenges. Coronavirus is a monster we have encountered on our way home, like the Cyclops or the Laestrygonians, or indeed an enraged Poseidon with a spiky trident. However, we can face it with less fear if together we resolve to keep our spirits up and steer ourselves with endurance and strength.
A cyclone has an eye where the waters are more temperate. Despite the hardships and the obstacles, like all steps in life, this one too has room for discovery. The journey might be long, and although we are keen to arrive, we mustn’t hasten, the poem suggests. Geographically, we are constrained as to where we can travel, but in our minds we can cover as far a distance as we would like and our imagination lets us.
We will glimpse new shores and havens. These might be as yet unreached depths of self-reflection and frontiers of authenticity. Through the intimacy of this personal search for a drift, we have a chance to gain deeper knowledge about ourselves, the world and our interaction with it, perhaps to an extent we could not have availed of during what we called normality.
We don’t exactly know how Ithaca will turn out to be, neither can we gain full control over the future. But, as Cavafy says, Ithaca will not have deceived us if we find it disappointing the moment we get there. That is not the point of destinations. Each of us has their own Ithaca to look forward to. It is up to us through the wisdom accumulated along the journey to develop better eyes to conceive of what it will look like. Considering what we are going through, one version to which we may aspire collectively is one pervaded with compassion, solidarity and love.
Cavafy encourages us to never lose sight of Ithaca. It is our fate to seek and long for it, as I think it is our fate to find ourselves. Maybe that nostalgia for the future is what we call hope.
Giovanni Frazzetto is the author of Together, Closer: The Art and Science of Intimacy in Friendship, Love and Family (Penguin)
