Last spring, like everyone else, the rhythm of my day-to-day came to a grinding halt. With the swiftness of all historical cataclysm, what I thought I knew I suddenly didn’t, and what had previously worked was now woefully inadequate. I say “like everyone else,” because of the universalizing import of a pandemic. Whether one takes it seriously or not — and we have seen so many distinct and frustrating shades of disbelief already — it is there, shaping our world.

When the first wave hit I was in upstate New York, teaching a university-level literature class on James Baldwin — a class that, like the rest of our daily lives, took place in person. I had to scramble. My lectures were suddenly on Zoom, assignments were emailed and shared on various clouds, class discussion took on the stilted rhythm of a group still not-quite-acclimated to life on the screen. It all had the eerie foreboding of something out of science fiction.