Sixteen years ago, we had just come out of the SARS scare; I remember lecturing about library research to classes of masked students. Now all the instructors at my current school are teaching online.
I'm teaching a travel writing course to students who are strongly advised, if not required, to stay inside. Luckily, one of the most recent readings for this class was the chapter, "On Habit," from Alain de Botton's book, The Art of Travel. In this chapter, de Botton relates the experience of trying to treat his familiar surroundings as new and strange. Drawing on the ideas of eighteenth-century Frenchman Xavier de Maistre, who wrote a book about traveling around his bedroom, de Botton suggests that we need to revisit the familiar; as he puts it, "Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen" (249).
In response to this reading, I asked students to walk around their neighborhoods and try to treat them as strange new places. I didn't know when I set up the course that COVID-19 would confine us to our immediate surroundings, but as I say, we live in interesting times. Some students addressed the coronavirus directly in their writings, pointing out how it had changed their surroundings and the way they viewed them. One cited a line from Pascal that de Botton quotes toward the beginning of his chapter:
"The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room"--Pascal, Pensées, 136.I guess we have a chance to train ourselves to stay quietly in our rooms.
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