Digressions&Impressions

Seneca (Letter 53), Long Haul Covid, and Impiety

I was suffering too grievously to think of the danger, since a sluggish seasickness which brought no relief was racking me, the sort that upsets the liver without clearing it. Therefore I laid down the law to my pilot, forcing him to make for the shore, willy-nilly. When we drew near, I did not wait for things to be done in accordance with Vergil's orders, until

Prow faced seawards

or

Anchor plunged from bow;

I remembered my craftsmanship [artificii] as an elderly [vetus] devotee of frozen water, and, clad as I was in my cloak, let myself down into the sea, just as a cold-water bather should. Whaat do you think I suffered [Quae putas me passum], scrambling over the rocks, searching out the path, or making one for myself? I understood that sailors have no  reason to fear the land [Intellexi non immerito nautis terram timeri]. It is hard to believe what I endured when I could not endure myself; you may be sure that the reason why Ulysses was shipwrecked on every possible occasion was not so much because the sea-god was angry with him from his birth; he was seasick [nausiator erat].--Seneca, Letter 53, Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with modest modifications) 

It seems likely that this letter was written during the last two or three years of Seneca's life, around AD 63, so, to be on the conservative side, when he was nearly sixty. I am just close enough in age to feel some himpathy for his scrambling over rocks in his cloak, while not obtuse to the comic nature of the scene. One can imagine the local villagers telling each other stories down the generations -- too bad there were no spyglasses or iphones to capture it -- about the fabulously wealthy, once powerful courtier and philosopher, famous for preaching "the incredible force of philosophy is to counter all the forces of chance" [Incredibilis philosophiae vis est ad omnem fortuitam vim retundendam], going onshore in panic and unsteadily.

Not unlike Aristophanes' hiccup, Seneca, who chooses to share the story so he is clearly not obtuse to the comedy of it all, realizes that our physical infirmity can undermine our dignity. Not to mention that Seneca may have originated the tradition of taking a new year's day dip in the sea. 

I do not mean to suggest here we're just in the realm of comedy. Seneca's impious naturalization of Odysseus's journey is not an isolated feature in the letter. For in context, the force of philosophy, especially in the hands of the wise [sapiens], is compared favorably to that of God (singular). The beneficial effects of wisdom are our own achievements, whereas God is, we might say, beneficiary of natural luck.

Before I get to the main point of the letter, I have to admit that the unsteadiness he describes at sea, hit a bit home this week. On Wednesday I taught my first in-person class -- fittingly on Book 1 of the Republic -- in over 17 months. I had divided the three hour seminar into three, giving myself and the students a break every 45-50 minutes. In line of the advise of the occupational physician, my department had lowered my work-load by cutting the student numbers in half. They also tasked the teacher of the other half to be my back-up, in case I could not make it to class. (For my covid diaries, see here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here, and here). 

The seminar starts at 5pm, and after lunch I developed an awful headache just as I was finishing up my hand-out. I usually just improvise my seminars, letting the conversation take us where chance directs (with a few sights I tend to wish to visit along the way.) But I had decided on the hand-out to take some of the cognitive load off my brain during the seminar. So, as I lay in bed, I contemplated initiating the back-up plan. Luckily, the painkillers worked and by three, I decided to bike the work. There I scouted the room, and even looked for a place outside in the heat. It was an evening for Plato under a tree, but sadly I could not find a quiet enough spot.

The students all arrived masked, and they turned out to be excellent. I was reminded again that even with inexperienced students in an introductory course, a seminar-style discussion is a site for mutual learning. A student's question led me to see that Polemarchus' attitude toward inviting Socrates anticipates Thrasymachus' understanding of justice. 

Unfortunately, in the second hour, just after I had gone through the course requirements, I felt my head go light (as if my sugar had dropped), and my legs went unsteady. In a moment of self-aggrandizing pity, I thought of the magicians that died on stage. Then I remembered Seneca's unsteady legs, and was comforted. Luckily, in my course plan, this was just the moment I had settled on a group assignment without my participation. So after quickly instructing and dividing them, I left the class room to get some fresh air and (against all my principles which forbid coffee after 5pm) an espresso. By the time I eased back into the class-room, I noticed I had not been missed and my head had settled.

My occupational physician has kind of settled on trying to convince me not to accept succor from medical science. But not to get too dispirited because while I am clearly not recovered, I am improved relative to some date months ago. More subtly, she tries to remind me that while my symptoms keep recurring -- weird memory loss, random headaches, what I call head-fatigue, lapses in concentration --, my recoveries of each seem fairly rapid.

And indeed, I managed to lead discussion in which we collected and analyzed the findings of the group assignment.  Because my students are so splendid, it was easy. But near the end I realized my brain was working at half speed. Good enough for the day. And not for the first time, I am reminded how lucky I am that, despite all the evils of the modern academy, I have landed in such a joy-producing occupation. (Of course, we'll see how many students show up for second class!)

There is a lot of interesting philosophy in letter 53. For example, Seneca insists that sometimes we know when we sleep that we sleep. And that there is an asymmetry in how we experience physical and mental/psychic pains.

But here I want to focus on the main point of the 53rd letter, which is Seneca's insistence that philosophy should be in some sense all-consuming (in context really, all conquering). "philosophy says to all things: "I am not going to receive at this time what was left over to you, but you will have that which I have rejected."" ['Idem philosophia rebus omnibus: non sum hoc tempus acceptura quod vobis superfuerit, sed id vos habebitis quod ipsa reiecero'.] This claim is out of fashion for three reasons.

First, it goes against the popular idea that philosophy is the mother of the sciences, who become mature (or at least adolescents) when they break off from philosophy. Now, we tend to think of philosophy as the diminished remainder, of what is left over, from the more successful, more progressive, and better funded sciences. This is familiar enough from the recurring crises of identity within philosophy which claims for itself (not entirely convincingly) expertise in conceptual analysis in one decade, in inferential practices in another decade, in analyzing arguments in another decade (or two), in modal thinking in another decade, and so on (yes, I plead guilty for having peddled synthetic philosophy). 

Second, it goes against the increasingly powerful idea that there should be a work-life balance, or a proper integration of work-life. And this reflects the idea that somehow doing philosophy professionally is in need of containment. And those of us who recognize the mad, publication arms race in the context of limited jobs, may well come to agree that someone should impose limits or we will be all consumed by trying to publish and refereeing the attempts to publish. 

Third, the very idea that philosophy is a way of life that can benefit us is taken to be archaic. And in so far as someone should be busy with how to live, and how to ground intellectually our experiments in living, it is thought this is best left to religion (we hasten to add, Eastern or Western) or to popularizing psychologists, who can draw on the best scientific insights. (I would mention our historical rivals, the poets, but our culture has let them wither.)

It is worth noticing that in so far as one accepts the modern intellectual division of labor, in the complex world of our open society (with heavy government involvement), this only makes more urgent that there should be a site of disciplined reflection on how to live collectively and individually. Rather than being embarrassed by wisdom, or relegating it to footnotes, or ceding it completely to mystics, philosophy should be inviting to those that seek paths to wisdom. Luckily the roads to wisdom cannot be patented or be turned into a trade-mark or turned into private property. As Seneca implies throughout the Letters, philosophy is our commons.

The activities that give us joy, community, and energy should not be limited. If we need to be protected against overworking in philosophy, perhaps we should re-organize how we construe the content of our work? Yes, Seneca's unsteady stomach and legs and my headaches are a reminder that there are physical preconditions to joyful activity that may be fragile along multiple dimensions. If you want to preach revolution, you may add the many unnamed slaves in Seneca's entourage, and the precariat at my own university to those material preconditions.

Let me wrap up. As regular readers know, I am myself not convinced that Seneca is right that philosophy can conquer uncertainty. And, Seneca's idea that philosophy should "rule" our lives is easily mocked. Yet, during the months I spent in my sickbed this year, I realized that such mockery is itself a sign that not all is well. That behind the mockery there is no insight, that nothing grows in its meaningless void. Our lives are relatively short, do not delay, "let us, therefore, rouse ourselves, that we may be able to correct our mistakes" and each take our baby-steps in our perhaps occasionally intersecting paths toward wisdom and let these shape our lives.

 

 

Chronic Covid

One of the most psychologically annoying features of long haul covid is that any new somewhat mysterious ailment generates the bewildering question whether it is part of the post-viral syndrome belonging to the aftermath of the disease or a sign of a new (potentially serious) problem. (For earlier installments in the series, see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here).

For example, since last week Thursday I suffer from a new kind of head fatigue. The fatigue disappears after a good night's sleep but recurs throughout the day. At first I thought it was an effect of too much intellectual ambition with me working on my Foucault manuscript. But the head fatigue also occurs when I am not on the laptop at all. I call it a 'new' fatigue because unlike the first five months of covid, this fatigue does not impact my ability to read intellectual stuff. It's not what other people call 'brain fog.' Rather, it is a feeling of tiredness combined with hunger (and irritability). 

As it happens, last week I picked up new fancy, varifocal glasses. I had gotten them because, as I remarked before, during my long bed-ridden period of convalescence I was reading books without my eye-glasses on, but with one eye closed. My cognitive-scientist, vitreoretinal-surgeon better half had nudged me to the optometrists suggesting that better eye vision might facilitate cognitive renewal. I never had varifocal glasses before, and I had been warned that a transition period might be tricky. 

In particular, I was warned not to use the varifocals at first while driving. After wearing them for about twenty minutes I could see why. As you move your head to look at new objects, different parts of the visual field go blurry. The haze disappears quickly as your eyes look through the right part of the glasses and the world returns to focus. Over time you notice the blurry moments less and your eyes adjust more quickly to where they should look relative to your glasses. While I do have a driver's license, I don't drive in the UK. This decision was unrelated to Covid (or Brexit). I simply decided that I do not drive enough anywhere to trust my judgment driving on 'the wrong side of the road' in the UK.

But last week as the fatigue first hit me, I wondered, is this covid or the fancy glasses? A week later, I can't be sure but I have to assume it's covid. Because by now I barely notice the blurry moments. And I do, in fact, enjoy reading books and my mobile phone without taking off my glasses. 

Either way, after three excellent weeks in which I was feeling close to recovered with only minor, lingering issues, now I am back at the stage where I am grateful for the good periods during the day. I was warned against such relapses by others in my long haul covid fellowship. But since I had read plenty of narratives about folk who had suddenly recovered fully, I had come to hope during the third good week I might be one of the lucky ones.

If you are like me, you might wonder what the physicians think of all of this? First the good news: I have had a battery of blood tests this past month. (For a while this showed in astounding black and blue marks thanks to a nurse's inability to find my veins.) The blood results all report that I am in fine health. The second bit of good news is that I am finally assigned an appointment with a long haul covid clinic. Sadly, that also contains the bad news, which is that the appointment is still seven weeks away. 

It's not that I expect much help from the long haul covid clinic. My GPs have tempered any expectation about breakthrough cures. Most of the folk who do benefit from medical intervention are showing symptoms much different than mine. But it would be nice to have some attentive, skilled medical attention beyond 'be patient, and don't push yourself too much.'

Anyway, it's now been six months. June was the best month of the year for me. It was the first month where I spent most of my time out of bed and active in various ways; I was very happy to be improved. I had been looking forward to my discussion with the occupational physician next week. While I am still hopeful I can return to normal teaching, say, in September at the start of the academic year, I now am considering the possibility that June was a harbinger of the possibility that my condition might be chronic; that I might be like the folks that have CFS/ME, and that I should expect good and bad periods to alternate.

When I started blogging about my long haul symptoms, a distinguished academic with CFS/ME told me she 'learned to become a fast writer.' (I have not asked her how she teaches.) Since I am a parent I write much faster, so I can relate. Even so, there is more to life than writing. As I contemplate this, I am wondering how I can be me with new constraints.  But now I must take my son to a physio appointment, for him.

 

Covid's Incomplete Recovery

It's about three weeks ago that I view as a turning point in my not quite completed recovery from covid. (For earlier installments in the series, see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here).  Since then I lead a more active and social life. I walk about five miles a day. I try to write three days a week for about five to six hours a day on my quixotic Foucault and the liberal art of government project. At the end of each week, I am pleasantly surprised how much progress I have made. But I don't trust my own judgment yet whether this is professionally interesting or just a weird form of delusional auto-cognitive-therapy.

I am more pro-active in reaching out to family by phone. I am less noise sensitive than I had been most of the year. We do family dinners again, and I find that when other people put on music I don't run away anymore. Last week I went to my son's school play, and enjoyed most of it. While my reading is still light, I did referee two papers this past month.

A propos of nothing. I read Ursula Le Guin's early novels: Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile in reverse order. They are both part of the Hainish universe. Planet of Exile was a bit disappointing, although in a weird way reassuring that her genius and wisdom was not fully formed at once. In re-reading Rocannon's World, I could see when in my first reading I had quit. I am glad that I gave it a second chance: it's a beautiful homage to Tolkien, and simultaneously a powerful meditation on the what it's like to be in the service of empire in the name of science and humanity. Since I had recently read Mill's (1859) "Few Words on Nonintervention," (as part of my liberal art of government project), Le Guin's wisdom really shined for me.

So, at first sight I seem recovered. And I am enjoying the mental space that for the first time in several decades I am free from deadlines and other commitments. I especially enjoy the privilege to ignore emails. My university does not have sabbaticals, so I imagine this is the headspace I have always imagined sabbaticals to be like. Of course, in a sabbatical I would try to write and read much more and more intensely.

Most of the obvious symptoms of Covid have disappeared: I sleep much better. Even so, while I feel much improved and optimistic again, there are some signs that not all is well yet. First, thirty to forty-five minutes is my limit of multi-person zoom. (I can lengthen that a bit if I close my eyes and treat it like a radio-show.) At that point I start to fatigue and irritability creeps into my demeanor. Yesterday, I went to a delightful and small dinner-party (of five adults and two kids). After about an hour I started to fade.  This fatigue can slide into modest temporary headaches (although nothing like what I experienced earlier in the year).

Second, I still have weird memory issues where I seem to have missed parts of conversations. I mangle words, and I can't recall names of people and events. Because my life is so simple at the moment, and I am so visibly improving, it's not especially disconcerting. 

Meanwhile I am still waiting for my appointment at the long haul clinic. Given my ongoing symptoms the perspective if a neurologist might be useful, although the neurologists I know all caution me not to expect much.  Every week I check on cancelations, so far to no avail.

 

 

 

Feeling Covid Optimism

This is, I think, my sixteenth covid update (see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here). It's the first one I am writing with a sense of optimism about the possibility of full recovery. This past week, I have been more mobile, more energetic, more social, and more intellectual than at any time since the middle of December. And while each day I hit a moment in which I simply have to rest, that moment tends to be late in the day and passes. I still find that viplin music I used to enjoy sounds like scratching on blackboard, but I can now tolerate simple beats much better than a few months ago.

I realized that I was improving in the middle of a rather lengthy eye exam last Friday. After noticing that I was reading books without my eye-glasses on, but with one eye closed, my cognitive-scientist, vitreoretinal-surgeon better half had nudged me to the optometrists. The hypothesis that persuaded me to go was that better eye vision might facilitate my convalescence and aid my cognitive renewal, as I like to call it. She might it sound as if the theory has a solid foundation in the literature. Rather than doing my own review, I decided, mindful of my Nietzsche, that hope was better than no hope.

During the exam I reflected on the fact that that week I had spent quite some time on the phone with lawyers, accountants, and immigration specialists trying to sort out how to approach the impending final Brexit deadline (end of June). The experience itself was frustrating because it's clear that if one's territorial and life-style circumstances are even remotely hybrid and one's aspirations is to keep it that way, most of the credentialed folk actually have no idea how the rules should be applied to you (and, admittedly, may come to the conclusion the rules themselves are not yet sorted). But that I could spend so much time politely on the phone over several days without collapsing was good sign. 

At the optometrist I had the deal with a number of (very kind) people for up to three hours. By the end of it I was tired, and considerably poorer, but I realized that my fatigue was not that much worse than it would have been anyway. Then, that holiday week-end our son went away with a classmate's family. My wife and I had our first days of privacy in more than a year. Sleep and sun did their magic job! And while there were still moments of fatigue and irritability on my part, especially because at times the noise and bustle Camden's crowds overwhelmed me, we walked for miles, went to markets, and enjoyed a date in a sit-down restaurant.

One rather unfortunate side effect of my long haul covid, which I have been perhaps too oblique about in these digressions, was a disinterest in physical intimacy. I think this disinterest was partially a loss of libido, but also a fear of my own irritability and hypersensitivity around others. To be attentive to and vulnerable with another requires a minimum of receptivity and self-trust that I simply lacked for most of the time during my long haul.

Meanwhile, I have gotten a bit more serious about using this period to write a somewhat crazy book, The Liberal Art of Government: a Commentary on Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics, which I am developing from my series of digressions. My underlying intuition was (and still is) that I am not quite capable yet of developing philosophical work from scratch. I am, however, improving at editing what I have. (My initial drafts read like a stream of consciousness on prednisone (recall).) Initially I did this in 20 minute intervals, but these are being extended to ninety minutes.

I wouldn't claim I am capable of days-long writing weeks on end; I have to vary my activity throughout the day to avoid headaches. Even so, I am getting increasingly more critical with my existing drafts and that tells me some of my professional instincts are recovering. I am now circulating an introduction and two chapters, although these are still plenty disorganized and not quite at the level one would wish. (Part of the problem is intrinsic to the book I am conceiving because it does not fit any pre-existing disciplinary molds.)

The previous paragraph hints at the fact that recently I have had too much time to reflect on my past and future. Perhaps because my convalescence coincided with my fiftieth birthday I have come to reflect on my limitations and bad choices. Somewhat disappointingly, the only major conclusion I arrived at, whose importance I already realized for quite some time, and have successfully managed to implement thus far, is not to answer work emails at once. It's not a major step in self-improvement, but it pleases me greatly right now.

 

Covid Midterms

I interrupted the flow of my covid diaries (see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; and here) because there was very little to add, and I wanted to use my 'writing time' for other intellectual activities. Three weeks later, progress is frustratingly slow, but there are some changes: my permanent muscle fatigue is gone. (Perhaps this is due to taking vitamins B1/B2 which was adviced by a fellow philosophical, long hauler. I can't prove causation, but I will happily continue with the pills.) I am less irritable around music and other people. We have had a few family meals now. I even went to the movies with my son the other day--Godzilla vs Kong is surprisingly moving and well done movie. After I was floored, but it was a joy to spend half a day with my son having fun; the first time in over five months!

I can spend about an half hour on zoom/phones before nausea and headaches set in. Sometimes I can stretch it a bit. For example, I didn't participate in the PhD defense of my brilliant student Lea Klarenbeek. But I very much enjoyed the proceedings on the webinar. To simplify: she used ameliorative analysis a la Haslanger and applied Anderson's ideas on relationality equality to the concept of integration. Crucially integration should not be viewed as a property of individuals, but of structures, societies, and groups with each other. (Her target is a kind of civic nationalist/communitarian discourse that rounds integration in Europe.) I could follow the discussion, but after I logged off I was floored. Yesterday we had parent teacher discussions on zoom with my son's teachers. After it was done I crawled into bed.

I still have periods of partial insomnia in clusters for a few days, but I also have days of fine sleep in a row. More important, I can read about four pages of philosophy in half hour increments a few times a day. If I go on too long I get nausea and headaches. So, I can read about 80-100 pages per week. (Kind of what I expect from our bachelor students.) Not satisfying, but at least stimulating.

I am unable to do creative intellectual work (unless one puts twitter in that category). But I can edit pre-existing material in thirty minute increments. Currently I am entertaining myself with the idea that I am writing a book on the Liberal Art of Government drawn from my digressions. The book will be a kind of commentary on Foucault Birth of Biopolitics. I have a draft of an introduction and a first chapter that I am circulating.

A new cognitive problem that I am aware of is that I suffer from strange memory loss. I don't recall conversations and I have trouble recalling names/places and other stuff that I ordinarily have at hand. I noticed it because my son was very surprised i had forgotten the details of a school trip (that's the kind of thing I get excited about). And he pointed out it was not the first time during the last few months. When I checked with my wife, she admitted that she had been wondering about my memory. But because I am otherwise so aware and present, she found it difficult to be sure. My occupational physician thinks some things don't imprint unless I am able to give it my full intention.

The NHS has shortened the amount of time for my second jab. So I will be fully vaccinated in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I have had a round of medical screening, and I have been triaged for one of the long haul special clinics. Unfortunately, they are experiencing "extremely high volumes" so it is unclear when I will be seen by a specialist.

Yesterday, my occupational physician took me through the roadmap ahead. Early in July she will make an official determination whether I can return to work in September. September is not just the start of new academic year, buy also, coincidentally, the moment my benefits will be (modestly, albeit structurally) lowered. We have also booked a date the end of July to make sure no correction is needed. She greatly tempered my expectations about what I can expect to be doing. She thought that lecturing might be possible, but when I said that I teach a (rather large) seminar style course in the Fall, she sighed kindly. 

September feels ages away, but after her sigh I was quite shaken. It didn't help that I spoke to a disciplinary colleague about his long haul recovery. He has benefitted greatly from rehab, but his underlying message was that while there is improvement he is learning to live with and accept his limitations. On some level I know that shows wisdom. 

In fact, while with due gratitude to my family (for their support), past unions and the welfare state (for my present financial support), and my colleagues (for their extra work), I view my long haul as an un-mitigated disaster. Even so, I have come to embrace one of my new routines: I have gotten used to not responding to emails at once. I especially have come to see the mental health benefits from not responding to work related emails at once. And while I find it frustrating that I cannot digress on the issues of the day, it's not an unmitigated disaster to focus on listening to others only.

I am not especially impatient day to day about my recovery. Since I suffer very little now, it's not at all unbearable. Because I have withdrawn from most commitments I do not feel much pressure. Part of me does not mind to give up my supervisory and managerial duties. While it is clear some of my colleagues have really had to do a lot of extra work because of my incapacitation (and some have let me know this in rather forthright manner--I love the Dutch!), I also feel things are organized enough that I am dispensable at work. But the conversation with my disciplinary colleague in light of my sweet sighing, occupational physician did rekindle the fear that I may never fully recover my intellectual or social skills. This fear sneaks up on me and occasionally sours my humor.

 

 

Covid Spring

On Sunday, April 18, I received my first AstraZeneca (Oxford) jab. (For my covid diaries, see here; here;  here; here;  here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) After a day or so, I started to feel very crummy with terrible headaches, fatigue, and irritability. Thankfully no insomnia. This lasted about twelve days. This past week I have been much better, especially daytime. Starting around 5pm, I often feel tired and hungry. The fatigue is no surprise because unfortunately, the partial insomnia has returned. In addition, I find phone and zoom conversations beyond twenty minutes still very exhausting. So, I spent my days on twitter and reading science fiction (I really admired the mixture of satire and sensitivity in A Canticle for Leibowitz). 

On Wednesday, I decided to try to do some real work: to read and comment on a chapter by one of the advanced PhD students I co-supervise. Her topic is fresh, but the author she is working on very familiar to me. She is an excellent writer, so this seemed like a good test-case. Since I had read earlier versions of the material, I figured it would be a bit like returning to a familiar face. When I tried reading it in the morning I got nausea, and my brain was not processing what I was reading. I felt panic, doubting I could ever do salient academic work again. I was mystified anew about the fact that I can read fiction and social media, but not academic work. After fresh air and lunch, I tried again. And then I read the (four section) paper one section at a time in twenty to thirty minutes stints with rests (that is, time on Twitter) among them. For an impatient person like me this way of reading is not an enjoyable experience despite my pleasure at the PhD's obvious improvement. 

Even so, that evening, fortified with a cheese and honey platter, I wrote up comments on the paper. I offered some distinctions, and referred to existing literature. I also made comments about organization and presentation. Because I could sense onset of fatigue, I offered fewer nitpicky comments than I normally would. I was too tired to re-read. But since I had spent a whole day on a task that ordinarily would take me about 90 minutes, I sent the email with comments apologizing for not responding to the rest (and important part) of the PhD's letter.

During the last four months, I had done some work related activity, but most of these involved logistical stuff (organizing exams for my class; organizing a team of indexers for my monograph; sending out emails to keep an edited volume going, letters of recommendation, etc.); and while often it felt like work, I didn't think of any of these as substantive intellectual labor. I had once or twice tried to start a new paper (based on ideas I had worked out in past lectures and digressions), but each time I realized I was not up to it. So, my comments on her chapter did feel like a small victory. But I was too exhausted to savior it.

The next morning, before the PhD had confirmed receipt of my email, I decided to re-read my letter. I I noticed a few typos, and uncompleted thoughts, but on the whole it looked like comments adequate enough for the purpose of giving direction and encouragement. Heartened, I opened a new word file, and typed in a title of a paper I had long intended to write. I started my introduction which would be the outline of the main argument. After ninety minutes I stopped because of great hunger and a strange fatigue. (I ended up having lunch very early.) After lunch I realized I could not return to work; I finished Dan Simmons' Hyperion, wondering if I should read Keats next.

While I have pulled out of other events planned this Spring, earlier in the week I canceled a talk at LSE later this month. It was no surprise to anybody involved, but a little bit died inside me. This invite had originally been planned for Spring 2020, but then we postponed due to the pandemic. At the moment I am unsure if I can attend (even by Zoom) the defense of one of my students later in May. My last planned event for the year is in Durham in June; that seems ambitious, too. So I just alerted them to the possibility of me canceling on them, too.

It's easy to give in to despair; I am still unsure about cognitive recovery, but I end the week with the glass half full. Did comment on that chapter, after all. I lead a pain-free existence surrounded by the comforts of life. When the sun is out, I read outside in the park or on quiet street benches. (I can't tell you how annoyed I am that Spring has been so cold here.) While I am still walled off from many of Mill's higher pleasures (music, arts, conversation), I am not suffering most of the time. Dogs say hi to me at my street bench, sniffing my books, and enjoying my petting. 

My GP is fairly confident I should feel more or less recovered by the end of June (six months after my onset). Because this week is so much better than last, I believe her sufficiently such that I did start discussing my Fall teaching assignments with the teaching directors. 

My life's field of vision is still quite narrow. The other day my wife noticed that I was reading my sci fi book with one eye closed. (For years now I would read without glasses reinforcing my sense of nearsightedness.) Covid has been so all-consuming, that my first response was is this another side-effect of my viral encephalitis? My wife laughed and said, 'no it's ageing.' Then followed a by now familiar explanation about decaying eye muscles and focusing. I realized she had explained the mechanism to me before, a few years ago, on a country lane during a Summer hike leaving Alfriston behind; but rather than feeling melancholy, I was strangely relieved to be reminded of normal, age-related attrition. 

 

 

Covid Diaries; Spleen

It's been awful since I received my AstraZeneca vaccine ten days ago. (For my covid diaries, see here; here;  here; here;  here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here; and here) I have had new kinds of headaches and weird fatigue untriggered by any activity. In addition, I am also highly irritable and have excessive hunger. Luckily, my insomnia has stayed on the (melatonin aided) downward trajectory before the jab. 

My blood work results came in, and were uninformative. My GP has asked me to repeat it regularly. So, yesterday's big project was organizing the next appointment. Thankfully, the NHS's online systems are terrific, so it was less exercise than I feared.

I don't regret getting the vaccine, and maybe in a week or two this past week will seem just a blip in road to my recovery. But it's been tough because the week before the jab I had been clearly improving and I was in all respects better than I am now.

 

When I first grasped that I may have long haul covid, my biggest fear was that I may never recover the ability to do philosophy; that the brain fog would never lift fully and that certain kind of concentrated thought might stay out of reach forever. But I kind of assumed blithely that I would be able to return to a normal life with physical labor and ordinary social activity. 

 

I now realize that my assumption was groundless. What prompts that thought is, of course, the fear that my headaches, fatigue, and irritability stay. The onset of the former is highly unpredictable. (The latter is kind of predictable by-product of the former.) If the fatigue does not disappear I am incapable of retraining to rejoin the workforce with more manual labor. (The fatigue nudge me into bed regularly.) The headaches and irritability make social activity, including parenting, impossible. When my son is happy -- and so singing and humming -- I withdraw from the room. Meanwhile, I am steadily withdrawing from further engagements and commitments, including some that were a source of great inspiration. 

 

Yesterday, not entirely coincidentally, I discovered that my wonderful former colleague, Fred Beiser, is cited as an authority on the definition of Weltschmerz in Wikipedia. Part of the bitter joke for me is that I had somehow missed he had published a whole book on it, and now that I have time and interest to read it, I simply can't.

 

Yes, I am still reading sci fi with great joy, but I struggled with China Miéville's Embassytown because it subtly mixed narrative (which I can read fine) with abstract commentary (which I found challenging). I admired it, but I did not enjoy the effort it took me.

 

Anyway, while I love the sound and connotations of weltschmerz it is the wrong word to capture my current sadness. I suspect spleen, while wavering between the French and English usages, does better.

 

Just before I got the jab, I had kind of planned to write a paper one daily paragraph at a time. I still intend to try that. But I won't start until I have a headache free day again.  

 

Other people have warned me that the setbacks are the worst. I can affirm that: living without grounded hope for what to expect makes the-not-awful,-but-not-at-all-fine-present much worse. Because my symptoms make social interactions so difficult and unpleasant for all involved, I recognize that I am withdrawing from people and activities that might otherwise cheer me up. (Yes, it's another way of saying, I spent too much time on twitter.)

 

Part of the despair is that leaving aside financial concerns downstream, I really cannot imagine what to do with my life if the fatigue, headaches, and irritability keep recurring. Even the idea of volunteering seems utopian, if by necessity I spent so much of my day in bed.

 

So, the days pass. Because it is rather chilly outside I can't even spend a lot of time reading sci fi even when I feel up to it. It's been about four months now. My local GP -- who recovered from a year long haul covid ordeal -- believes that after six months, I should start noticing structural improvements. I want to believe her.  

 

Covid Diaries: hermeneutic self-care

On a beautiful Sunday evening I got my AstraZeneca (Oxford) jab at the Francis Crick Institute. They were running ahead of schedule, so they called me (on a foreign mobile phone-number!) to ask me to come in early. It was brilliantly organized; the crew was cheerful -- 'yes, I was ready to make history!' I responded --  and I was in and out of the building under fifteen minutes. Sometimes, I get a glimpse of why the the Brits adore their NHS.

Anticipating the moment six weeks ago, my wife had initiated the effort to get me -- a foreign citizen living abroad -- registered in the NHS through her GP. (Long story, but the bureaucratic hurdles to my family arrangements are the effect of Brexit.) It was not a very easy process, not the least because of my foreign phone-number. If I had been able to leave my bedroom, I would have gotten a local phone, but all the High street phone-stores were closed through lockdown anyway.

As it happened, just after I confirmed my booking for the jab, I met my local GP last Thursday for the first time. She was extremely empathetic and informative. She had also had suffered from long haul covid since March 2020, and had just gone back to work full time again after a year of struggles. (I suspected she still struggled with it because she was a bit scattered and very fatigued; she did not deny my observation.) She took her time with my story, referred me for blood-work and to a special long haul covid clinic to see a neurologist. She was adamant that I should not expect much medical help, but that she did expect my convalescence to be enhanced by proper diagnosis of my symptoms. It will help you craft your narrative. I noted quietly, based on a small sample, that while Dutch physicians love their new-age 'energy-levels,' the English are more into hermeneutic self-care. In her view, covid had induced a viral encephalitis in me. After six months you should see real improvement. A bit of mental calculation told me, I was probably near the end of my fourth month.

Maybe it was the emotional let-down of feeling heard, but the next day (after my visit to the local GP) I felt awful. It was a long day of fatigue and headaches. I was concerned because due to my wife's shift, I was alone with my son for three whole days. But Saturday I awoke after a restful sleep and then had my best 48 hours since mid December. (For my covid diaries, see here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here; here; here; here; and here.) We walked all over NW3 to farmer's markets, tennis, table-tennis, and other errands. When I got the jab, the superstitious part of me worried that I was messing with success. 

I was right to be worried. Monday I had a strange new headache. On Tuesday I had a strange new nausea; and on Wednesday I was intensely fatigued. While the blood-test on Tuesday was unavoidable, the whole experience was dispiriting: standing in long queues in a truly ugly building (the Royal Free), and a computer mishap that turned me into Eric Liesser. I very much regretted going to my dental hygienist yesterday (mercifully she turned off the radio for me). But postponing it every other week for the last few months, had felt like giving in to the microbes. I also had a sore arm, but it was not as bad as I had worried.

In order to cheer myself up, I tried reading the final lecture/chapter of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics in order to see if I could still do philosophy and re-start these digressions properly. (I really do want to complete my series on the book this Spring.) It was not a wholly silly plan; I have been reading sci fi for two weeks now. And increasingly the reading has become less effort and pure fun. This has been good for my sanity; I love watching movies endlessly in the theatre, but at home I actually find it tiresome.  I now was almost at the 'being-sick is fun' part of my convalescence. 

Anyway, I have learned that there is a major difference between reading a book without much concentration immersed in a kind of flow and reading a book with concentration in order to, say, write about it. In the second, I am constantly taking mental notes (sometimes I scribble these in the margins) and I am in a perpetual silent conversation with the implied author about the work I am digesting. To be sure the flow is not absent in the second kind of reading, which I find very enjoyable and ordinarily (forgive me) energy enhancing, but it involves a further mental activity that I am clearly incapable of now. What's interesting to me -- switching briefly to auto-phenomenology of disease -- is that I find my hyper-engaged ordinary style of reading no less immersive than the kind of reading without much concentration now. 

As regular readers know, one of the side-effects of my covid (or the encephalitis) is a great deal of irritability when engaged with conversations with more than one person at a time (or having radio or music in the background during a conversation), and any zoom/phone conversations. It's pretty clear to me -- I am, after all, the editor of a volume on sympathy -- that my capacity to engage in even modest sympathetic activity has been greatly reduced. This is why I have compared myself recently to an Asperger's. I had not quite realized before that my manner of reading involved so much mental, dialogic activity.  It's a skill that presupposes a brain that I don't have at the moment.

Interestingly enough, and undoubtedly not a coincidence, a lot of the sci-fi novels I have been reading have been exploring the nature of such dialogic activity by positing brains with two or more minds. It's a nice mirror to all the plot-devices that explore the nature of networked intelligence (and AI). A brain with two minds also is a nice metaphor, thus, for reading and so these sci-fi space operas are engaged in a sly form of intertextuality.

It didn't help me, of course, that in violation of  all teaching manuals, Foucault introduces whole new special jargon in the final lecture! (This prevented me from reading the lecture merely at the surface in the way I am reading social media.) He gets away with it not because he is Foucault, but because he treats his lectures at the Collège de France as serial in nature rather than as self-standing series. (There are cross-references among them.)* It's a bit unfair to say this (and given Derrida's criticism of Searle, ironic), but by the end of the 1970s, he is clearly also understanding himself as a franchise.

 

 

The Half Full Glass of Long Haul Covid

A big thing happened: I can read books again! I haven't tried philosophy yet, but I have started to read complex sci-fi novels. I finished Seth Dickinson's The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I had abandoned when I got sick, in thirty minute installments. Then, on Monday I started Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, which I read more or less normally without developing headache or fatigue. I say 'more or less' because I didn't read either with pen in hand and so without my more customary half an eye on a possible Digression. That is to say, despite many temptations,* I didn't have the intense interior dialogues with them I would ordinarily have. (Yes, I need to scribble in the margins of a book in order to have my best interior conversations!)+ But I was fully immersed in the narrative. 

So compared to my unfolding long haul baseline (here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here) the glass is definitely half full. In addition some other non-trivial symptoms have been reduced in severity. I average now one lost day to headache per week. I even had a ten day stretch that made me hope it was completely gone, but that was premature. On average I sleep better; the proportion of good nights vs bad nights has become favorable. (The effects of melatonin are finally noticeable when I awake in the middle of the night; I now mostly fall back asleep.) And I am physically much more active. But this also brings me face to face with my body's real limitations now.

My son's day-camp was moved to a new location. It is 1,2 miles in each direction. The route there is down, the return is uphill. I do this twice a day. It's pure joy because I get to engage with my son as his dad again, and not just as somebody to avoid bothering. At no point am I out of breath or do my legs feel tired. But it does predictably generate the characteristic 'head fatigue' I have tried to describe before. It also creates the kind of fatigue I associate with the aftermath of day-long hikes, but without any endorphins or sense of achievement. So, in effect I still spend most of the day in bed (but instead of watching kung fu, I am reading again). The good news is that he goes back to school on Monday, and that is a third of the distance. 

In the previous paragraph I also hinted at another symptom that has not disappeared. I am still highly irritable in conversations with more than one person, and I get exhausted by phone conversations. So, dinners with my whole family are challenging. 

I have disliked most confident optimistic responses by people who tried to wish me well and encourage me. I know they came from a good place. But even so, I dislike being offered hope that is not sensitive to my particular circumstances (and ungrounded in solid evidence). For all I know the previous sentence might be a sign of clinical depression or resolute anti-religious aesthetic sensibility.  But the fact that I can read books again, and manifestly enjoy doing so, does inspire hope that I may recover some cognitive skills whose absence were grounds for quiet despair. Either way, in virtue of reading the solitude of my days has been alleviated because I have good company, again. 

 

 

Conversation is a Surprisingly Difficult Skill; the Covid Blues, part #28752

I wrote my most recent entry in my 'covid diaries' (here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here) a week ago, just as a noticeable upswing occurred. Since, I am clearly capable of more physical activity -- I often clock an hour of intermittent walking each day now -- and I have a few 'clear' hours each day where I feel 'normal.' This despite the fact that my chronic insomnia is ongoing. I still can be struck by sudden head-fatigue out of the blue without any apparent trigger, but more often than not the head fatigue and occasional headache is a consequence of too much activity. I still sometimes awake to a headache (almost certainly partially responsible for the insomnia), but I now can be more confident it will dissipate during the day. 

The lecture course I was responsible for has ended; I now spend some of my good morning hours copy-editing proofs, which had been piling up, in twenty minute spurts and answering emails from the brilliant crew creating an index for one of my monographs. The department has been pretty good in leaving me alone during my officially sanctioned incapacity, but it is noticeable that beyond the many generous inquiries about my health, any business message I receive tends to be some bad news or an annoying issue that requires my relatively urgent attention.

Three days ago, during one of my insomniac mornings, I picked up Keynes's Essays on Persuasion. Despite his evident antisemitism, and the sense he is talking to a different audience than me, I read it with great deal of pleasure. I had forgotten what a wonderful stylist he is! And I was struck by how much he anticipates what came be to known as neo-liberalism, and how astute on the major political fault-lines around sexual identity of what we now call post-keynesian society (especially amazing because he never witnessed the keynesian version). (More about that some other time.) After an hour, as my family was awakening, I noticed with a quiet ecstasy that I had read him for a full hour without any headaches. Sadly, the feat has not been repeated since. 

One nice thing about my relative improvement -- not a moment too early, I have been bedridden for over three months now -- is that I have time to reflect on some of the symptoms that escaped my notice earlier. What follows was prompted by the aftermath of a nearly hour long phone conversation with a friend over the week-end. I had been needing some professional advice, so I made a phone-date with a trusted academic friend whom I have known forever. I felt in safe hands, and was grateful for his insight. There was not a single note of dissonance during the conversation and for most of it I just listened. (My wife later told me that it was noticeable that I said less and less as the conversation went on.)

I should mention that when I could, I had been avoiding zoom/phone conversations since a few weeks after I fell ill. But that was because of my extreme irritability to human voice and sensitivity to certain (not all) sounds that I had developed alongside my Covid. But while the irritability and pseudo-misophonia has not disappeared altogether, in my good hours it's no worse than normal. 

After we hung up. I was drained, and a pale green. I laid in bed for three hours uninterested even in a Jason Statham movie. I was also in a kind of shock. It had never occurred to me that listening to somebody and remain engaged with what they say, when you like them and they are talking about something you care about (Ceteris paribus), is work. (Yes jokesters, I am open to the suggestion I have never tried my hand at listening before!) 

Most of my cognitive incapacitation I interpret through the filter my GP handed me a few weeks (months?) ago, when she pointed out that anything that requires my brain to multi-task or split attention creates a kind of overload now. (As an aside, I have been bemused that both my GP and my occupational physician have deployed a set of metaphors -- 'energy'; 'force'; 'etc. -- to help me grasp my own situation that can only be described as new-agey.) And I have become rather disciplined in avoiding situations in which that is likely. So, even at home I avoid conversations or rooms with more than one other person. This is also why, on the whole, I am not watching complex drama's on Netflix, but action movies.

In 2006, when I first met Vernon Smith, I had the kind of interaction that in the hands of a better writer would be comedy gold. I had just landed my first tenure track position, and I was eager to talk about my paper in which I modestly criticized his methodological views, while Vernon's agenda was to learn from me about Adam Smith.   At some point during the conversation, I realized Vernon Smith (who had just won the Nobel in economics) was a very deep reader of Smith. (I warmly recommend Vernon's book with Bart Wilson.)* Since I had already learned quite a bit about Smith from Buchanan in the preceding years, and was then a respectful reader of Sen on Smith, this gave me the wholly false impression that economists as such cared about Smith. 

Anyway, during this conversation, he planted the idea in my head that Adam Smith might have been an Asperger. (Later I learned Vernon had shortly before revealed himself ('come out'?) as an Asperger.) Vernon's remark never guided my interpretation of Adam Smith (although it seems plausible hypothesis to me), but like many readers of (Adam) Smith I find his phenomenology of daily life astute, and I have been taught to see what he calls 'situations' or interactions in a new kind of light. As it happens, on my interpretation of Adam Smith, for Smith many of our interactions occur while we are simultaneously making rapid judgments ground in and about counterfactuals several layers deep about the agents' principally concerned (which might include ourselves). If this is confusing or too terse go read my book!

Now while I admire Adam Smith's description of social life, it is by definition not something you can quite introspect. (In some respects Smith's reliance on sub-conscious processing goes much further than Hume's.)+ So, I have always treated this part of Smith's moral psychology as an interpretation of his text not necessarily obvious truth. 

As I was reflecting on my total exhaustion after a kind and nurturing conversation, I wondered in silent amazement how much cognitive skill goes into a simple (low stress) conversation. And before I knew it I heard myself saying to myself that tacitly keeping track of all the boxes and, especially, diamonds during a conversation must be quite (ahh) energy intense. :)

Before hands-free calling opened the floodgates of people talking while walking on the street, the only people seen mumbling to oneself were the people you tried to avoid and the elderly (sometimes the same person). In fact, and I close on this, one side-effect of my covid is that I am starting to grasp some of the elements of what it's like to be elderly. 

For the first time in decades, I have no agenda each day; and I am incapable of doing anything quickly. (That still doesn't stop all the mishaps; while I didn't burn down the kitchen, last week I broke the microwave plate.) I also can't jump into any activity my son might tempt me with. His cheer, which ordinarily I would find lovely, now may in its exuberant expression may well discomfort me. And when, after reflecting on this and sundry matters,** I asked my wife whether I had aged these last few months, she said in the kindest possible way, 'I just had that thought last week;' she must have sensed the bullet pierce my heart before I registered it, so she quickly added for good measure, "but maybe with a haircut we can de-age you."