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It is tempting to start this essay with a quarantine cliché. You see, the old complaint, the one about these “deep solitudes and awful cells” (thank you, Alexander Pope), grates against my soul. Instead, I would like to begin by utterly ignoring the pandemic and talking about the weather or the latest gossip, but I cannot ignore the glass that cuts between the world and me. Whether it be the glass of my window or the glass of my computer screen.
How to escape from such a dull topic as the pandemic? There is no easy answer. I tried romanticizing the situation: Is my residence hall not a tower? Am I not Rapunzel? But this method does not do the trick. The real problem is not quarantine itself, it is me. It is the incessant “I” that commences each sentence about a solitary life. It is the relentlessness of my reflection in all the glass barriers.
Art offers one method of escape, even though one’s artistic preferences compose their own hall of mirrors. I lie on my bed, lights out and laptop on my stomach, and I watch films, ballets, operas … This is intended to transport me from this world, but – what’s this? I see my reflection juxtaposed upon a close-up of Greta Garbo. I am reminded of where I really am, which is in my dorm room, in the dark, my hair damp from a recent shower. And the lack of glamour depresses me.
My thoughts turn to the plush theaters that are out there, somewhere, sleeping in the dark. Do the ghost lights wish for ghosts to keep them company? They always did do a bad job of warding the evil spirits of productions past. I wonder if, in their loneliness, the theaters are embracing their phantoms. Perhaps my past self is among that crowd of theatergoing ghosts. Yes, my past self, my pre-pandemic self, exists in so many theaters.
I see myself at the Film Forum in Greenwich Village, a first-year film student illuminated by the flicker of black and white film. I am also at Lincoln Center in all my finery, weeping at operas about consumptive courtesans. Then there is little me, this time on the stage. She is a sylph dancing in a long line of ballet dancers. I want to visit her, but to do so I have to go to Queens, and I’ve forgotten the way a long time ago, even before the pandemic hit.
Most importantly, my past selves are not alone. They are surrounded by other ghosts who are applauding and weeping and dancing. Existing in the theater, whether as a spectator or performer, means losing oneself in art while also being part of something. This kind of artistic participation can be a cure for solipsism.
But it is easy to idealize the days when I had a reason to own dresses and study a subway map. I choose to forget that even those adventures were solitary, that even then there seemed like there was glass between the world and me.
