Thoughts in Isolation

"Reading made me a traveller; travel sent me back to books" 

- Paul Theroux

My year started with an unexpected setback: I tested positive for Covid-19 on the very first day of the year. I had awakened on Monday with a strange chill in the body and a feeling of tiredness. Aware that the number of infections have risen sharply recently, I proceeded to take a self-test and true enough, it was positive.

But since I work from home anyway, I continued working as usual and my productivity was not affected at all. My symptoms were mild and it was just slightly uncomfortable during the first 2 days. I had no fever at all but there's some irritation in my throat, which made it slightly difficult to talk in con-calls.  I feel back to normal now, after 6 days of isolation, but annoyingly I'm still testing positive.  No matter, everything I have is in my room--sufficient books to last years of continuous reading and a good internet connection. Can't think of anything else that I need. Secular sanyasins like me are an easily contented lot.

Yesterday, I decided to take leave and dedicated the whole day to reading--a luxury I've not had for a long time. Today, I'll simply do my usual Saturday routine, which is to blog and read a good short story. I have the practice of reading a short story every week; only one, so that I have the opportunity to reflect on it for the rest of the week. Last week, I was thoroughly entertained by Guy de Maupassant's Mademoiselle Fifi--another brilliant story (like his most famous one, Boule de Suif)  set during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, involving a prostitute as the unlikely heroine. I have not decided what is this week's pick, but I usually try to choose a different author every week.  

My bedroom now is almost exactly the same size as the one I had rented in Singapore, when I was working there more than 2 decades ago. It was a second floor HDB flat located in Bishan, which I had lived happily for a number of years, doing a lot of work via my 4mbps ADSL connection. 

I used to work from home too, even then, as my job involved a lot of travelling and I rarely went to the local office.  My bedroom then was also filled to the brim with books that I had bought, mostly from Borders at Orchard Road. It is quite impossible to be unhappy, when one is surrounded by books.

Many decades ago, on my first business trip to Silicon Valley, I lived in a motel for at least a month in Palo Alto. I remember many beautiful quiet nights there reading hardcover books I had bought cheaply from a bookstore nearby--especially books on exploration like Pacific Passions and The Mutiny on the Bounty, which for some reason, I was obsessed with then.

Isolation has never been a problem for me, as long as I have something to read.  Long flights to and from the States had been great opportunities to finish entire books on a single journey.  Maybe that is why I actually have a preference for going on trips alone rather than with colleagues because I'd get a chance to read and reflect. 

Thinking back, I remember more about foreign cities which I had spent a lot of time alone in than those I had visited together with friends. For example, I can hardly remember anything about Honolulu, Lyon, Shanghai or Seoul because I had been carousing there with my colleagues during my trips there.

I agree with Paul Theroux that real travel is at best a solitary enterprise.  He refers to the "lucidity of loneliness" to capture unique insights about any particular place.  My wanderlust has waned considerably over the last decade or so, but my passion for reading had only intensified. Admittedly my reading has increasingly being augmented by technology such as audiobooks and videos, but they only enriched and expanded my reading experience.

Slowing down and isolating myself because of Covid-19 isn't such a bad thing after all.  I reconnected with my reading roots--to those wonderful days and nights I had as a child, reading in the garden amidst orchids and daisies under the blue sky, and later as an adult in tiny motels and luxury hotel rooms over the world, in slow-moving trains, in busy airport lounges and long interminable flights across the Pacific. Yes, thanks to Covid-19, I'm happily banished to isolation again with my books.