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How are these days changing us? Time itself is altering. It’s spreading across a vast plain around us, thinning out, perhaps about to vanish. Last week I was at work around midnight. I wanted a character to be distracted one morning by a sound outside his bedroom. I wrote of ‘birds quarrelling in the eaves’. Instantly, I knew it wasn’t mine. Its source was well-known, but lost to me. I went to our poetry shelves and took down a Penguin Selected, its ‘acid-free’ paper the colour of ageing banana. I had a pretty good idea the line was from a D.H. Lawrence poem, ‘End of Another Home Holiday’. It wasn’t. I sat down anyway to re-acquaint myself with half a dozen favourites, including the beautiful deathbed poem, ‘Bavarian Gentians’, and the strange Lawrentian moment of hatred in ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’. I reread a fine essay on the poet by James Fenton. I inspected the flyleaf of my Selected. My name, then Woolverstone Hall (my state boarding grammar school) — then 1965. Who else obsessed me that year? Only Yeats. And there it was, in my Collected, also from 1965. ‘The Sorrow of Love’, 1925, and its first line, ‘The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves…’. My 16-year-old self (how I suddenly missed him) had copied out an earlier, 1892 version, which I used to prefer. And still did. It was well past 3 a.m. Who cared? We now live beyond time. Behind me, almost warm air was pouring through an open window. The moon was setting. I could have found the Yeats line in seconds on Google. Instead, hours of poetry and sad-sweet reminiscence in a timeless mindscape.
One last vocab item. Serology: the examination of blood serum for antibodies. The government has been promising a test that will show who has had the disease and is therefore immune. This is our get-out-of-home-and-back-to-work card. In that same spirit of grown-up politics, and to spare itself yet more beatings, it is time for the government to broadcast the growing scientific consensus that a reliable test is proving extremely difficult. Too many false positives and, even more dangerous, false negatives; many who have had no symptoms have no detectable antibodies; many varieties of tests pick up immune responses to other coronaviruses that cause common colds; it is not yet known how long immunity lasts. The words of Larry Brilliant, the distinguished epidemiologist of smallpox eradication fame, are chilling. ‘This bundle of RNA in its sack of fat… sits patiently until there are no more susceptible.’
All human artefacts and institutions deserve respect for outlasting the centuries. The Rosetta Stone, the Hereford Mappa Mundi, The Spectator! Approximately 2,200 issues ago I read a withering parody of an exuberant young writer giving an interview. What a pompous fool! I was mostly dashed, slightly honoured and ever since have tried to be more careful. So, uh, thanks a lot, Spectator. And happy ten to the fourth.
Copyright of Ian McEwan
Because you read about boris johnson
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