For even as I was straining my back by carrying boxes up the stairs to donate or sell to the noble used book dealers of Washington, come bedtime I would go online to take a quick peek at the current offerings from L.W. Currey, John W. Knott, Richard Dalby’s Library, Type Punch Matrix, Wonder Book and Video or Capitol Hill Books. It didn’t matter that I ached like a stevedore at the end of a double shift. During daylight hours, the world applauded a crusading Dr. Jekyll energetically focused on discarding and recycling printed matter, but once night fell Mr. Hyde would emerge and, while fiendishly cackling, type arcane titles into the search engines of viaLibri, eBay and Addall.
The virus has given us a picture, at once frightening and beautiful, of a world without tourism. We see now what happens to our public goods when tourists aren’t clustering to exploit them. Shorelines enjoy a respite from the erosion caused by cruise ships the size of canyons. Walkers stuck at home cannot litter mountainsides. Intricate culinary cultures are no longer menaced by triangles of defrosted pizza. It is hard to imagine a better illustration of tourism’s effects than our current holiday away from it.
Coronavirus has also revealed the danger of overreliance on tourism, demonstrating in brutal fashion what happens when the industry supporting an entire community, at the expense of any other more sustainable activity, collapses. On 7 May, the UN World Tourism Organisation estimated that earnings from international tourism might be down 80% this year against last year’s figure of $1.7tn, and that 120m jobs could be lost. Since tourism relies on the same human mobility that spreads disease, and will be subject to the most stringent and lasting restrictions, it is likely to suffer more than almost any other economic activity.
As tourism’s impact on the world has deepened, so the global economy has come to depend on it. Now, after the freeze forced upon foreign travel – unimaginable even six months ago – we have a rare opportunity to extract ourselves from this destructive cycle, and do things differently.
My obsession with webcams took off during the third week of March. As a travel writer stuck at home, in self-isolation, with no possibility of an actual trip on the horizon, I found myself tuning in to live streams from public spaces around the world. First it was Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing, that massive traffic intersection where people move in patterns under cute Japanese bubble umbrellas. I was surprised to discover the crowds only slightly sparser than they’d been on my recent visit. A few clicks later, I was off to rural Czech train stations, platforms bathed in strange yellow light, destination signs wobbling in the wind. I checked out the Castro in San Francisco, hoping to catch a glimpse of friends who live nearby, followed by a random stretch of New Zealand road, near Wellington Airport, so boring that my eleven-year-old son and I actually gasped when a truck drove by. But it’s to the webcams of Rome, specifically the feed from the Spanish Steps, that I return almost daily. A ticker at the bottom of my screen indicates that other armchair voyeurs are online here—between 200 and 2,000 of us at any given hour during quarantine. In this moment, when people can no longer just pick up and go, I’m not alone in finding other tickets to travel, discovering other ways of seeing.
Long-suffering as one of the thinnest-margined businesses in existence and one of the least-looked-forward-to places to visit, the supermarket has, for more than a decade, been under assault from e‑commerce giants, blamed for making Americans fat, accused of contributing to climate change, abandoned in favor of restaurants, and, in parts of the country, disappearing at a concerning pace. Esteem for the supermarket runs so low that, although Fairway technically is one, Howie bristled when I called it that. “I never liked us to be considered a supermarket,” he told me. “We used to be, you know, a food store.”
Yet in recent months, the supermarket has assumed a new centrality in Americans’ lives. Cashiers, stockers, distributors, wholesalers, packers, pickers, and truck drivers have, even in the absence of adequate health safeguards, continued working to ensure that shelves stay stocked. Foodtowns, Nugget Markets, and Piggly Wigglys have emerged as crucial lifelines, spawning a broad reappreciation for one of the most distinctly American institutions. Grocery shopping is no longer one in a long list of mundane errands. For many people, it’s the errand—the only one—and it now seems not inevitable, but somewhat amazing to be able to do at all.
In a cave in Wadi Sura, in the southwest corner of Egypt, there is evidence that one of the driest corners of the Earth used to be flowing with water. The Cave of Swimmers (famous from The English Patient) is covered in paintings of little human figures that appear to be doing doggy paddle. They suggest not only that the Sahara desert was once crossed by rivers and lakes but that, about 8,000 years ago, people were swimming in them. And apparently loving it.
So begins this fascinating history of how, where and why humans swim. It is perfect reading for those missing a splash-about during the lockdown. Howard Means, a lifelong swimmer and coach, explains that swimming “remains deeply encoded in our biology”, and sees it not only as a panacea but also a leveller for humans. Water “forgives our infirmities, physical and otherwise,” he writes. “It frees us to dream. Swimming is an equal playing field.” Or, at least, it should be.
the first time I ask Tana why she left El Salvador, me dice: porque allá llueve mucho. its waters too vast and devious, too quick to wash away everything she’s worked for.
From my mother’s funeral
I brought back Illinois
Sunday morning on the parquet
Sunday morning on horseback
Sunday morning picking lice from her hair
. . . with a rosary and prie-dieu