It’s probably not very academic to mention Paulo Coelho, I suppose, because of his new age connotations and the seductive sense of superiority that we get from relying on citations and peer review and institutional frameworks. But I don’t care, because it’s Week Forever of the Covid19 lockdown, I don’t talk with anyone outside of my immediate clan and the occasional chat with an armored grocery store worker, and everything everywhere is different. My zoom colleagues (now there’s a phrase that wouldn’t have made any sense before all this) sometimes note with amusement how much I’m turning into a caveman. I have #CoronaHair and #CoronaBeard. But we’re all too happy to see one another, even virtually, to pay much attention to each other’s grooming. We’re all in sweatpants anyway.

For me, now that the initial shock of the transition has passed, the question has moved into trying to understand the features of The Great Pause.

And I think Paulo Coehlo has it, way back in the Alchemist, in his vignette about the two drops of oil.

The short version is that a young man searches for the wisest of wise men to find the secret of happiness. When he reaches the palace of the sage of sages, he asks for the secret but is told first to wait for a few hours and, while waiting, to carry around a spoon in which the sage has dropped a little oil. At the end of the two hours, the young man returns with the safeguarded oil, and the sage asks whether he had appreciated the splendors of his palace.

Chagrined, the boy sets out to see the wonders of the palace. He returns to after another couple hours, amazed at the opulence, but when the sage asks him about the spoon, the boy finds that he has lost the oil. And that, of course, is the secret of the sage’s wisdom.

And that’s the secret of the current quarantine moment too, at least for me.

It’s paying attention to things I need to do in the immediate, in the now. Feed my kids. Shave, probably. Write articles that say something, and submit them to journals, and follow those breadcrumbs one after another. While, simultaneously, keeping in mind the enormity of what’s happening all around us. The ways in which the pandemic highlights all the sicknesses and inequalities in the political economic configurations we’re currently struggling against. The people who have it so much worse than me, and who need help. The people who have it so much better than me, and who most probably aren’t going to use this moment as an opportunity for change.

Who knows how much longer this is going to go on. Switzerland is officially opening up this week but it feels premature and foolhardy, though I can’t tell if that’s my paranoia speaking or a fair assessment of reality. I’m buckling up for wave 2 and dreaming about the easy luxury of going for a beer without wondering if I’m going to die, or if I’m going to kill someone else. Strange times.

It’s not so easy to worry about writing a paper or building a career in the face of these global calamities, but then again, that’s my couple drops of oil.