Quarantine comes from the Italian for 40 days, 40 as in the 40 days and nights of flood in Noah’s time, Jesus’s 40 days of spiritual torment in the desert before beginning his ministry and the edict in 14th century Venice that ships remain at anchor for 40 days before entering port during plague years. I didn’t know this etymology 40 days ago but I know it now. I am, in effect, quarantined like everyone else in my part of the world while the covid-19 pandemic plays out. This quarantine, for me, has already lasted longer than that. But 40, Google tells me, is simply a metaphor for “a long time.”
Enforced seclusion should be a writer’s friend. There you are in your favorite chair with your yellow legal pad and purple pen watching clouds pass overhead, opening yourself to inspiration. I’ve just finished reading Patti Smith’s memoir M Train which begins with this arresting statement: “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” M Train, it turns out, is a collection of Smith’s dreams, musings, vignettes from daily life and fragments of personal history loosely strung together like beads on a necklace. It drew me in. Smith did manage to make something out of what she called nothing.
I, on the other hand, feel burdened by a surplus of “somethings”—unread books that may serve my work, poems in draft that won’t come to life, weighty pandemic themes asking to be addressed. The editor of a periodical I admire has issued a call to send in anything we past and present contributors have written about this challenging time. I have nothing. I wait. I’m tempted to be facile and claim that it’s not easy making nothing out of something. But what I’ve learned is this: the impetus does not come from me. It’s given, just as I believe it was to Patti Smith as she sat in her favorite café with notebook and pen. It will come when it comes and I will be ready.