Shelter in Place #7: “Consumption” and “Connection”
Consumption
BY GRACE STEMPEL ’21
Snap. Sigh. Silence. Sirens. These are the sounds of me finishing another book while I shelter-in-place. Since the weather has warmed, I have been dragging my unemployed ass out of my bedroom and into my apartment building’s private courtyard each day, book and iced coffee in hand (isn’t it uncanny how some things will never change?), ready to tackle another long day of escapism. The science-fiction novel we are currently living through got old very fast.
I have always pushed back against the idea that I read to escape the real world. I have tried to explain with little success that, contrary to popular tech bro opinion, literature doesn’t conceal life — it illuminates it. The story truth is truer than the real truth, I tell them. They stare back at me, unconvinced and unwilling to turn a page. Read Tim O’Brien! I cry. Please. Sometimes, I have questioned if this insistence on the value of literature is but a selfish justification not only of how I choose to spend my free time, but of what I have chosen to study. Television and movies have long accepted their status as entertainment, escapes from the humdrum of daily life. Why can’t books do the same? And moreover, why do I have to explain myself to every Computer Science major at Princeton?
In spite of myself, these days I have embraced the book as escapism at its finest. I sit outside in New York City, armed with a mask and a bottle of hand sanitizer, and I read about comic book writers in Brooklyn, love affairs in Ireland and warring houses in Westeros. I don’t tell myself that I am searching for some higher truth anymore. Right now, I am trying to forget. And for the most part, it is working. I am finding normalcy in printed pages and imagined worlds because daily life has become full of excitement, disbelief, and tragedy. At least in books, it’s not happening to me.
Snap. Sigh. Silence. Ice cream truck jingle. These are the sounds of me finishing another book while I shelter-in-place. The sirens have begun to subside — the books have not. Spring blooms in New York City and I think — hope — it might be time to put the pages down and buy a cone.
Shelter in Place is a new series featuring student artists’ and writers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.