The Authorial Rabbit telephoned friend M. A. Titmarsh the other day. Titmarsh is self-isolating as is the AR, but showing no symptoms.
“I’ve been remembering John Keats,” cried AR. “Traveling in ‘the realms of gold,’ which someone pointed out recently meant, as well as its metaphorical sense, just reading, because old books had gilt at the edges of their pages. For most of his young life Keats was running hard from the consumption that killed him at age 26.”
“Very cheering,” responded Titmarsh.
“Did you know that when Keats went to Italy hoping to slow his disease, he and his friend Servern were quarantined on a ship for ten days in the Bay of Naples where there was an outbreak of typhus?”
Titmarsh did not.
“Keats’ father had died falling drunk from a horse coming home from the pub when the boy was young. His mother died of TB when he was fifteen. His younger brother Tom died at 19 from TB. Keats had looked after him for years and probably caught the TB from him.”
“Too much information,” said Titmarsh.
“His sister lived to a ripe old age.”
“There’s that,” concluded Titmarsh.
“How are you holding up?”
“Missing being out, certainly,” said Titmarsh. “Uneasy. Fearful. Grappling with the immensity of it all. The historical fact of it. Learning of so many deaths, deaths of people everywhere, all ages, all occupations, all incomes, all skin colours, all religions. Trying to read the graphs. Hoping for flattening curves.”
“‘. . . and quite forget/What thou [the nightingale] among the leaves hast never known,/the weariness, the fever, and the fret/Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;/what palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,/Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Keats was so young. Do you not think we mostly hide from this reality, this ever-reality? And when we cannot hide, what then? Can we never again fly with the nightingale? ‘The fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.'”
Silence on the line.
“Keats’ had another brother, in age between him and Tom. George. George was a commercial man. He married, and more or less the next day and embarked on a packet ship for America, became successful for a time in Illinois.”
“Oh?”
“The sea voyage in the early 19th century from Liverpool was tough. Forty-seven days at sea, another type of self-isolation, two weeks first on board in dock at Liverpool waiting for a favourable wind to depart. George and his wife rented a cabin, a very tight fit, no modern comforts. Dickens described it in his voyage to American. The folks in steerage had it much, much worse, all jammed together, no toilets, smelling like a sewer within days, contaminated water, having to bring and prepare their own food on makeshift boards in the hold, the storms deafening, sleep impossible for days. Then the tough life in the new world. This I’ve been learning in Denise Gigante’s The Keats Brothers (Belknap Press, 2011).”
“Yes.”
“Thanatos.”
“Gesundheit.”
“No, I mean the son of Nyx, the goddess of night, and Hypnos, the god of sleep. Death.”
“I have to wash my hands.”
“Freud used Thanatos to describe the death wish. Has it been a death wish in America to vote for people who advocate or at least decide to not address poverty, racism, no medical care, no preparation for pandemics? Who disparage science? Preachers who insist their congregations attend services in person even as the virus is spreading everywhere? Ask their congregants to keep sending money to them, because the money will save them?”
“Perhaps it has.”
“Keep healthy. Wear your mask.”
“I always do.”
J. B. Thompson 