Books—And the Time-Warp of Long-COVID

Time’s axis has shifted. It has become relative. In a mundane, everyday kind of way it is expansive and leisurely, almost indulgent. Nothing is urgent. I am not bound by a routine that is regulated by my watch. I edit mss., read proofs, correspond with authors, discuss projects, in the knowledge that none of these are going anywhere in a hurry—at least for the “foreseeable” future. I’m not rushing to publish a lot of books, to make up for lost time (there’s a thought, time that has been lost in lockdown) because there is a serious question mark hovering over sales. Who will buy? Will people rush out to buy books just because they have been confined, or will they have had their fill of reading already, because they could do so little else? Maybe the last thing they will want to do is pick up another book. Let’s give book production a bit of a rest, I think. But at an existential level, time has suddenly collapsed into itself. Is no longer measurable, because—will I even be around to see those books published if I don’t hurry up and get them out? Shouldn’t I be accelerating instead of slowing down? What if I run out of time? And so I manoeuvre myself into that tiny space, that sliver of time between lockdown and post-lockdown, whenever that might be, to think and plan for a week at a time, which seems to me a good compromise between the everyday and the existential. As for normal, it looks like I might be wishing for too much and too little at the same time for, as Grace says, “everywhere vast public suffering rises in reeling waves from around the earth’s nation-states”.