I wonder if there is such a thing as a literature of self-isolation. I suppose there is if I say there is. All I have to do is find examples and thread them together in some coherent account. A good place to start is Wordsworth’s famous “Nuns fret not” sonnet. Written more than 200 years ago, it supposes a very different world than our own, a world in which people found pleasure in gentler pursuits like reading. In a way, self-isolation is harder today because we’re used to a world of hyperstimulation. We have our view-on-demand accounts, our social media accounts, our never-ending news feeds that offer up the latest from every corner of the globe. And, when hyperstimulation in this world isn’t enough, we can always hop sideways and hyperstimulate ourselves in virtual worlds.
This weekend, our son set up his VR gear in our living room and I started to explore the world of Half-Life Alyx. I have trouble getting beyond the opening scene for the simple reason that there are magic markers and a window and the temptation to scribble on the window overwhelms me. And what better words to scribble than “Nuns fret not … “? So I offer a personal mashup, like a wobbly footbridge spanning promontories that are 200 years wide. Here’s a screen cap: the opening lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet on a VR window that overlooks a postapocalyptic landscape where aliens have taken over the world and the ground is littered with zombie carcasses. Read the full text below:
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.