Pandemic Journal #23
WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS—During the early days of quarantine, back when I was still trying to keep straight which Tolstoy princess had the mole and which had the mustache, and was still forcing my family to gather before the hearth every evening, as our forebears had, to hear the patriarch read poems aloud; before, that is, the fear of becoming very ill, or of losing our home, had really kicked in, I opened The New York Review of Books and turned to the classifieds. Twentieth-century artifacts still gamely chugging along, these notices offer all kinds of enticements: a farmhouse in the Dordogne or Tuscany, a kit for constructing a geodesic dome, a massage of uncertain propriety.… Seguir leyendo »