JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Sorry to inflict this on you, I kept the image small.

As lockdown was beginning, we read about how Shakespeare had an amazingly productive time in quarantine during a plague outbreak. In isolation he wrote King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth. The piece was widely circulated to keep our spirits up as we faced weeks and months marooned in our houses. (We forgot that Emily Dickinson produced all her work while self-isolating.) The message was: Now you have time to write that masterpiece you’ve been thinking about since college. Uh-oh, just remembered a song from the 80s which went like this:

Gonna write a classic
Gonna write it in an attic
Babe, I’m an addict
An addict for your love

(Per Google it’s “Got to write a classic,” but I don’t think there’s a way to make the lyrics worse.)

My first job after high school was at a Top 40 radio station, and this song was in rotation along with Dirty Creature by Split Enz (whose members went on to form Crowded House) and Tommy Tutone’s Jenny 8675309, a title which harks back to a time when people remembered phone numbers. Classic by Adrian Gurvitz is a memorably terrible song that shows us what most people will actually produce when they set out to write a classic.

My point is that the Shakespeare-in-lockdown theme should be taken in context. Outside quarantine he wrote Hamlet, Othello, all the parts of Henry IV to VI, The Tempest, an entire English Lit syllabus. He may have appreciated the time freed up by quarantine, but he would’ve written the stuff anyway. If you are from the “Shakespeare cannot possibly have written all that, he was a committee and not an individual,” please send your objections.

Last week the “See what you can do in lockdown?” subject was Isaac Newton. It was noted that with university shut down by plague and old Ikey holed up on the farm, he was able to invent much of what became theoretical physics and calculus (smackdown with Leibniz!) so that later, when an apple fell on his head, bonk! Out came the laws of universal gravitation. So now that you’re trapped at home, you can codify your theory of everything!

First: By the time Newton (No! Don’t think of Fig Newtons!) was sheltering in place, all these ideas were already brewing in his head. Quarantine didn’t unleash his genius, it gave him time to put his thoughts in order. Second: Outside of lockdown he laid down the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics, analytic geometry, optics, cubics, and dabbled in alchemy. He made time for his intellectual pursuits by avoiding distractions from stuff like personal relationships. Third, good luck competing with that. If there is the slightest crack in your ego, you’re in for sorrow. Citing Newton is like saying, “Sige nga, invent calculus.”

It should be noted that lockdown means the opposite of solitude for the majority of the population, who do not live alone, who work from home, attend Zoom conferences all day, and homeschool their children. (Teachers online, be kind to the harried parents who are doing your jobs.) Any chance the TV stations could broadcast the old Sesame Street, just to keep the kids occupied?

Sunday being the Feast of the Resurrection let’s talk about ours, and seriously.