There is a woman in Italy with her mouth open - some might say in a silent scream. It’s been that way for almost two thousand years, since a few hours after Vesuvius erupted and the ash that settled on her body hardened into a shell, which remained untouched until it was discovered sometime in the 18th century, even as her flesh decayed away inside. In 1984 the ghostly vacuum of her final posture was filled with resin, so that her life, and its final moments, might be made more permanent than they already were.
There’s a sense, I imagine, when looking at this resin woman, that she holds more stories about Pompeii, and about human history, than any book, or excavation, or lecture series ever will, because the stories that humans contain are infinite. We can’t hear them, of course, but we know they are there. This is the real power of history, which makes and unmakes sense of our fragility and transience—yes—but also of our permanence, having existed.
The official history of Covid-19 will not be the individual stories preserved in the shells of human psyches. It will be data, graphs, political movements. It will be numbers, policies, speeches. It might be (God forbid) army movements, takeovers, communications hijackings. Even then, those will be too detailed for the types of Big History that men like Yuval Noah Hariri, author of Sapiens, and David Christian, author of Origin Stories, have become known for and which frame individual existences as tiny as they can be framed, in enormous scopes that attempt to cover as much time and space as we can comprehend. In these grand histories, Covid-19 might warrant a paragraph. Then again, it might be edited out.
Personally, I find these huge time-scale narratives incredibly satisfying. I like things neatly tidied away. It calms me to realise that in the scheme of things we are basically specks of dust, and that nothing we do is truly significant, or insignificant. In a personality group activity I did as a teenager where we had to identify ourselves with an animal, I innocently chose a hawk because, I explained, ‘I like to see everything.’ But equally I think that such histories, largely patriarchal and agnostic as they are to human suffering and experience, don’t actually see everything. Most importantly, they don’t see the power of human intimacy, which might, in the end, be greater than our insignificance.
This morning after dropping my daughters at preschool and school, perhaps for the last time in months to come, I imagined (like many others) keeping a diary which documents the human experience of Covid-19 at an intimate level. But I imagined that this might be more than just my diary, and that others might contribute their immediate thoughts, understandings and experiences as they happen, from around the world. I already wish I had started this two weeks ago, because so much has changed in such a short time. The shifts our comprehensions have gone through are enormous already, but will we remember them? And how else will they unfold? This might be our Vesuvius. What shapes will we take in the fallout?
The first time I flew in a plane I was six. I went from Christchurch to Dunedin with my mother to visit my aunt. I was excited beyond containment. The view from the window, of the Canterbury plains, stretched out from the mountains to the sea in all their multiplicity of shape. colour and texture, was something I could never have imagined. ‘It’s like a patchwork quilt,’ my mother said. I had heard that description before, but only when I saw it altogether did it make sense. That’s how I see this project. A patched collection of stories, not a seamless blanket. I want to do it because I want to know what people in other places-whether they are next door or on the other side of the world-are thinking and doing and how they are changing in reaction to this still unfathomable thing. And also, so I don’t go mad.