JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The Catholic Church has wisely suspended mass during “enhanced community quarantine” in order to observe social distancing. Even after we get out of here, I’m guessing that holding hands while singing the Our Father, shaking hands as a sign of peace, or dipping your fingers in the communal font will not be back soon. The Church’s decision can’t have been easy. Not only is it Lent, peak season for Catholicism, but humanity is being stalked by an unseen evil (just as my religion teacher said) and the faithful need solace. After a week in lockdown I suspect even atheists would be happy to attend mass if it would get them out of the house.

One week down. Three to go. (I am aware that it could last longer; I am trying not to fall into a depression. Depression, you will find, is as real as hunger.)

As luck would have it, I started reading The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner just before lockdown was declared. Set in medieval England during the Black Plague, it’s about everyday life in an obscure nunnery. Ordinarily that description would not appeal to me, but I have been in awe of Sylvia TW since Otsu gave me her biography of T.H. White. It takes a brilliant eccentric to understand another. If Sylvia TW wrote programming manuals, they would read like comic thrillers.

In the novel the nuns do their chores, the prioress worries about money (they live on tithes the peasants refuse to pay, and she wants to build a spire), and the little son of the disgraced nun is bored. We are living inside a novel set in a medieval English convent during the Black Plague.

The resident priest departs for a more exciting post, and there is no one to say mass or give last rites to the dying nuns. Then a vagrant wanders onto the convent grounds and is mistaken for a priest. The vagrant is an educated man—a rarity, even noblemen were illiterate—who has read the books and travelled to Spain, so he can perform the offices of a priest. If this were the classic pandemic book The Decameron by Boccaccio, sexcapades would follow. This is not that book, but it is riveting in a different way. The fake priest cannot bring himself to leave the relative comfort (regular meals, a roof over his head, safety from marauders) of the nunnery, but his fear of being found out and his guilt at leading the nuns to damnation (technically they haven’t heard mass in years) drive him mad. That’s as far as I’ve read, and I’m savoring each chapter.

Many times I’ve heard it said that “You can’t learn about life from books.” Obviously they haven’t read the right books. Even if you learn nothing, books will keep you from losing your mind in isolation. I am that bespectacled nerd played by Burgess Meredith in the original Twilight Zone, who survives a nuclear war and rejoices that he finally has time to read all the books he wants. And then his only pair of glasses breaks.

I have lots of eyeglasses.