Quarantine has sucked us into an intimidating vacuum of time. Time to fill. Time to waste. Time to produce. Time to grow. Time to simply pass through. This time, far from liberating, has produced a unique anxiety.
My own fears hover around the question of how this time will define me. What future me it will create.
Like many people, I have retreated into familiar entertainments. Where others have sat down with Friends for the umpteenth time, I’ve consumed Hannibal again, reading the Thomas Harris novels along the way this time. There is something comforting and familiar about sitting down with an old favorite. Yet while my appreciation for the depths of that art has certainly grown, I fear I have not, at least in many meaningful ways.
But maybe that isn’t really true.
The social isolation and anxiety of quarantine has necessarily forced us to grapple with loneliness. Academics, who often move far away from old lives and connections to pursue work, are particularly vulnerable to this type of loneliness. And for this dilemma, Hannibal is a useful piece of “equipment for living,” as Kenneth Burke puts it.
At its heart, I would argue that Bryan Fuller’s series is a loving kind of fan fiction, taking the Hannibal Lecter universe of Harris’s novels and crafting them into a provocative, violently beautiful meditation on the tension between finding your true self and overcoming the loneliness that quest brings.
This theme is eerily appropriate for our fragmented, socially distant world. To some degree, we’re all Hannibal looking for our Will Graham.
The other great comfort I have found in this time is Matthew Arnold. The Victorian proponent of “culture,” might be thought of as the patron saint of quarantine. Not only does his work anticipate the alienation of the modern world, he has for so long been dismissed by Serious Academics that we might consider him #Canceled since mid-twentieth Century, if only for lack of notice at this point.
Certainly there are authoritarian moments in Arnold’s writing that don’t sit well with important values we cherish today. But in the grand movement of his poetry and criticism, we see not a cultural authoritarian, but rather an advocate of human flourishing and for intellectual humility. Arnold’s brand of intellectual honesty required a willingness to criticize one’s “own team,” which made him a lightning rod for controversy in his day and this is indeed a recipe for loneliness. All the more so today.
Yet diving back into his poetry, criticism, as well as biographies about him, I found my own loneliness lessened by seeing it reflected in the man with audacious sideburns. Like Will Graham and Hannibal identifying their lonely selves in the other, Arnold has made me feel less lonely in the forced loneliness of quarantine.
For whatever reason, I’ve always felt a personal kinship with Arnold. When his heavy and world-weary poetry was first published, friends and family were shocked at the tone, as Arnold was a rather profound silly-heart who appreciated an inappropriate joke more than what was deemed acceptable. Likewise, I too often pull a rug from under professional and social interactions. Yes, it is immature, but I am compelled to resist our lives being defined by the dogmas of professional custom. I am too willing to live with the social consequences of being inappropriate, just as I suspect Arnold was. I’m sure many people feel about me the way Charlotte Bronte felt about Arnold after meeting him (she wrote of him “his manner displeases from its seeming foppery”), but there is a self that is worth protecting by most means necessary.
I am also, as Arnold was accused of being, a dilettante. I prize the variousness of life and fear losing the ability to experience that variety by becoming “serious,” or an expert in a given field. A deep part of me fears losing the ability to experience the fullness of life by how much time must be devoted to becoming an authority in one or two fields. Professionalism is another kind of machinery in whose image the self is created.
Everyone is always becoming someone else. We are shaped by economic circumstances, geographic location, family heritage, our own desires, and yes, the isolation of Covid quarantine. As Hannibal might say, our becoming is always at hand.
Quoting Bishop Wilson in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold wrote, “First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness.” The critic’s concern here was twofold. First, Arnold argued for the intellectual honesty to see things as they really are. Our commitments, whether political, economic, or professional can become catastrophic dogma if treated as unquestionable. Second, and more to the immediate point, we should be aware of how the world is creating us. In our time of binge-watching comfortable media and having The Right Opinions, we must beware of being mindlessly formed by the machinery of our time.
His great poem “The Buried Life,” might be read as a statement of bleak alienation. Individuals, cut off from their true selves by the mindless pursuit of their chosen machinery, are also cut off from one another. It is a profoundly lonely poem and a powerful one to read in isolation.
But it does not settle into a comfortable existential dread. Arnold holds out the hope of finding our truest selves, when “A man becomes aware of his life’s flow.” It is only “When a beloved hand is laid in ours,” and “our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear.” In short, we do have access to a truer, better self, but only in community with others.
This could serve as an epithet for Hannibal. Both Will and Hannibal are cut off from the fullness of whom they might be and can (tragically in this case) only find a glimpse of that self in the other. (I am, to be clear, very lucky to have already found my beloved - as the happily-married Arnold himself did - and married her long ago, which has been my salvation during this lonely time.)
So if we are to take a lesson from Matthew Arnold to guide us in the age of Covid, it might be to not settle into our loneliness, allowing it to create a future version of ourselves that we may not much like. Seek out the beloved in whom you might find your fullness.
PS. This age has been made all the more horrible by our insistence on engaging it through social media, where “ignorant armies clash” not only by night, but 24/7. Read “Dover Beach” for advice on this.
Danny Anderson teaches English at Mount Aloysius College in Pennsylvania. He tries to help his students experience the world through art. In his own attempts to do this, he likes to write about movies and culture, and he produces and hosts the Sectarian Review Podcast so he can talk to more folks about such things. You can find him on Twitter at. @DannyPAnderson.
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