Bad as this last year has been, with the twin plagues of coronavirus and toxic politics, plus having to conduct my classes remotely, teaching has proved a surprising pleasure and source of joy during these dark times. Working to bring light and warmth to my classes, along with intellectual rigor, I try to make my courses count by being meaningful. You might think that’s hard, teaching seventeenth-century English prose and poetry in the twenty-first century, but the classes are going well. They’ve been such a gift for me. My students tell me my remote classroom feels like a safe, comfortable space; and sometimes they even have fun. Nothing could make me more grateful.

The fact that I’ve enjoyed teaching for many decades is something to be thankful for. Having meaningful work, and a salary, is challenging for many during these times and not something I take for granted. Sometimes, when I think of all those years and approximately more than 5,000 students, “at my back I … hear/ Time’s wing’d chariot hurrying near” (Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress”). But when I’m teaching, that anxiety disappears. I think I’m teaching better than ever, and certainly differently in these days that have forced all of us to change.  

I’ve been making an effort to put joy back into learning, both for my students’ sake and mine. With the constant emphasis on tests, performance, and competition from grade school on, so many people lose the sense that learning can bring pleasure, excitement, and yes, fun. I told my class the other day, “have fun with this assignment. There is no right answer. Discover something.” I asked them simply to look up a text on Early English Books Online (EEBO) that had been published in the seventeenth century; it could be something we were reading, or it could just be something they found while browsing. My students were to describe in detail what they saw, what they thought about as they looked at the images, and think about how an old printed book differs from what (and how) they read today—in modern books and anthologies, on the internet, even books on ereaders like a Kindle. My students loved the assignment! Some nostalgically longed for the day when books had been rare, precious things you could hold, mark up and pass on to others. Some thought about what is lost in our modern experience—the personal, the individualized printed book, the material, leather-bound book or the flimsy brown pamphlet that had been held by others. One male student told me, “I decided to fall down a rabbit-hole of YouTube videos about the craft and preservation of old books. I really loved this assignment.” Another student was drawn into Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, having suffered herself from a feeling of pensiveness. Yet another came across a seventeenth-century volume about the book of Revelations’ prophecies of Apocalypse, and it made him think of the current state of America. As I read their short papers, I came to the realization that they weren’t the only ones learning in the class!

Perhaps more than ever before, my students have also been learning that the past is not just past, that writings from the past can connect in complex ways with our present. Although I always tweak my courses year after year, this time I decided to rethink and restructure my course, “Seventeenth-century English Prose and Poetry,” adding the subtitle, “In Our Plague Year.” I asked: how would that literature sound like in our present moment, given our experiences of isolation and anxiety, the enormous and growing numbers of deaths from a plague where no one is safe, and what’s creeping towards a civil war in our socially and politically divided country? As I tell my students, every time you read a book it “means” something different because you are in a different place, you are reading it in a different time, not just historically speaking, but personally. Really good literary texts (ones that absorb you) take on different meanings when you read them at different times in your life. Why not apply that idea to my teaching and teach my course differently? How does John Donne’s poem, “The Good-Morrow,” celebrating how love makes, “one room an everywhere,” sound now? Or Katherine Philips’ celebration of female friendship when read in a women’s liberal arts college? Or Ben Jonson’s, “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” when he describes an idealized imaginary evening eating and talking with a friend, in a time of deprivation and even danger? What if just before our November 3rd election we read about the English Civil War, with its concern with liberties, calls for social, political, economic changes and a king who insisted he was above the law?

The best way to begin our course during the time of Covid-19 would be by reading selections from Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a series of meditations for twenty-three days, written when he came close to dying from the plague in December 1623. He charts the course of his illness, his experience and his attempt to make sense of sickness as he confronted mortality. What could be more relevant? My students, surprised, said, “this is me, this is us!” There’s his horrible isolation and solitude, the fear of dying, the sense of living in a world where the “center” is “decay,” and then his recognition in Meditation 17 that we are all connected (even if only by our mortality and vulnerability): “no man is an island, entire to himself.” After a week and a half on the Devotions, my students felt they owned it, that Donne was one of them. They had connected, intellectually and emotionally, through close, immersive reading, to what had first seemed an alien, ancient text. They were now ready for his poetry.

Thinking and writing helped Donne survive, gave him a sense of control in an uncontrollable world, gave him a sense of purpose. He serves as a model for my students, a model for all of us to make something positive out of our supposedly “unprecedented” situation.

I find myself happiest reading, thinking, writing and teaching. It makes you present, focused and maybe is a way to deal with trauma. Right now, teaching, especially, gives me a sense of purpose. Sure, it takes more time than ever, if I’m going to make the remote experience as meaningful, intimate, and personal as possible. I want my students to have a sense of accomplishment in what they do, to create their own topics for term papers, which will matter to them and help them move forward.

I meet my students individually outside of class, on Zoom or my cell. In fact, I “see” more students than I did when I had face-to-face office hours. All of this is often exhausting. But having lost my husband almost a year ago to a horrible, protracted neurological disease, I’m grateful for a renewed, meaningful purpose for my life. 

Young people are our future, so we better give them our best and give them hope.

For the last eight months, though really for four years, my world (our world) has felt like it was spinning out of control.  Yes, the coronavirus, in its seemingly endless cycles throughout the U.S. and beyond, which has seen more deaths and cases per population than the rest of the world, making America the present leader in a category we’d prefer not to be. The repeated changing of instructions by our leaders as we grapple with how to live with Covid-19, continues to surprise us, and then there are the aftershocks people previously infected are experiencing. The vicious cycle of hopes and disappointments over treatments and vaccines is simply overwhelming.

But there are so many other plagues that we are suffering from in America—political and cultural divisions, increased sales of guns and ammo, the appearance of militia men who want to take the law into their own hands, a president and at least one of his counselors who advise martial law, a president who threatens not to accept the results of an election or to leave office peacefully; the emboldening of white supremacists who threatened armed violence; the explosion of conspiracy theories and QAnon, which (like right-wing white supremacists with their mistaken notions of what liberty means) foment suspicion rather than trust, hatred rather than love. So many expressions of venom and threats of violence makes me sick. 

No longer do Americans agree that there is a difference between truth and falsehood (let alone good and evil). Some of the same people who announce they are “pro-life” when it comes to conception hold the lives of others in little regard, sometimes don’t even regard people of different races, ethnicities, or religions as fully human beings. The times, and America, feels vertiginous. It has lost its balance, and I can only hope it will regain its equilibrium and sanity after November 3rd, and move to become the place where all humans can live freely, though lately that seems like a distant dream.

            Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all of this. I work hard to keep steady, focused and hopeful. I show up. I do the work I believe I am supposed to do in this world. Even after so many decades of teaching and mentoring young people, I still love my work and feel a sense of purpose in my life. But then, unexpectedly, last week one morning, I was felled by an attack of vertigo!

I’d gotten up, sent a brief prayer of gratitude out into the universe, and had my cup of green tea. I began my pilates session with my wonderful trainer, Alexandra, breathing deeply, centering myself, only to become profoundly dizzy when I lay down on the floor to continue. The room spun, my head spun, and I could find no center. As John Donne said in “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World” (1611) lamenting the decay of the world,

’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,

All just supply, and all relation. 

Our world seems sick, falling apart. And now suddenly I felt sick. I was so dizzy and nauseous that only after a time, was I able to slowly get on my hands and knees and navigate through the rooms of my apartment to find a bottle of water. One minute I had been fine, and strong, exercising, ready to begin my day. The next minute, I was flat on my back, the room spinning. I could talk just fine and think, so I knew this wasn’t a stroke. It was probably crystals that had gotten loose in my middle ear causing vertigo as it had four or five years ago. But right now, I was terrified. Would I survive this if it continued on?

For several days I was incapacitated, stressed by the anxiety of my condition, anxiety that maybe I was plummeting towards my end and not healthy, but also anxious because I had so many papers to grade. Soon I’d have to teach on Zoom. Was all that internet and computer activity damaging me or was it something more? Or maybe was more symbolic, like a mirror of everything that was going on in the world, my crazy America, spinning out of control, all while on the heels of an historic election. Now this, on top of the anxiety I’d suffered for several years as my husband was slowly dying of multiple system atrophy? Even MSA seemed a symbol of America, its multiple systems atrophying!

At the moment though, struck by vertigo, I thought of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which I had been teaching in my 17th Century Prose and Poetry class only a month earlier, a proper introduction teaching in the year of our plague. Donne was suffering from the plague and unsure whether he would survive. Donne’s words describing his experience almost four hundred years ago, when he was stricken, dizzy, confined to his bed, sounded as if I could have written them myself.

“Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; . . .

We attribute but one privilege and advantage to man's body above other moving creatures, that he is . . . of an erect, of an upright, form . . . Other creatures look to the earth. . . This is man's prerogative; but what state hath he in this dignity? A fever can fillip him down, a fever can depose him; a fever can bring that head, which yesterday carried a crown of gold five feet towards a crown of glory, as low as his own foot to-day, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.”

Thankfully, my vertigo eventually stopped. I’m fine and went to vote last Sunday. I’m hopeful for a good outcome (for myself, and for the nation). I remain cautious, fearing a relapse, but pray every day that America too will soon regain its balance, and become stable and healthy again.