Travels with Long Covid

In June, I contracted covid-19.  Due to a combination of exam stresses and the debaucheries that followed, the infection caught me when my immune system was at its very weakest.  With only a single dose of vaccine for protection, I unfortunately succumbed to long covid.  For the last three months, I have been suffering from severe fatigue, dizziness and migraines, which various remedies have failed to treat.  The result was that my summer took on a shape I did not imagine after I had graduated from Durham.  Gone was the post-graduation holiday, and nights out were no longer an option.  However, my summer itinerary has been no less exciting than I first imagined, and actually involved much more travelling.

I was lucky enough to be bedridden in an environment with a well catalogued library.  When you read, you escape from the environment around you.  The concerns of your body dissipate as your mind contemplates the contents of the pages.  It is an exercise that requires only rational faculties, which mercifully survived the onslaughts of the virus. Reading enabled me to escape my stuffy bedroom and ill-health and to travel through time and space.  If this travelling was not enough, reading each book was to have a conversation with the greatest minds of human history.  Not only did luminaries bring past and imagined worlds into lucid focus, but bestowed wisdom and strengthened my soul as their narratives dazzled.  

Socrates once mused: ‘How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you?’.  This ancient wisdom is surely true, you cannot literally fly away from your problems and anxieties.  New scenery and cultures offer only a temporary reprieve from the demands of your psyche.  Ultimately it is your mental perception of new surroundings that give it its vitalising qualities, rather than the physical fact of being there and seeing it.  My travels with long covid have shown that the reverse is also true.  You can experience the mental benefits of travelling if only your mind, in a tranquil state, is there with aid of a book.  

My first journey was to the ancient Mediterranean and surrounding civilisations with Tom Holland’s lively translation of Herodotus as my guide.  I beheld the Persian Empire rise from the mire under Cyrus, I witnessed awestruck as the Pythia, a priestess possessed by Apollo, uttered the will of the god and repeatedly shaped the course of Greek history.  Most vividly was Leonidas’ last stand at Thermopylae.  Herodotus’ narrative put Hollywood’s 300 in the shade, ‘they defended themselves with daggers, if they still had them, or else with their fists and teeth’.  Via a Greece consumed by plague and civil stasis, guided masterfully by Thucydides, I arrived in Euripides’ Thebes.  This is a magical world were Dionysius, the wine god himself entered the city as a flesh and blood being.  The line between human and animal is permeable; a Bacchic trance impelled the queen to tear her son Pentheus into ribbons using only her hands, and Cadmus, the venerable founder of Thebes, along with his divine wife Harmonia were transformed into snakes.  Insidious enchantment pulsates to Dionysius’ intoxicating tune, himself shifting shape and gender, as the feverish music of pipes and draughts of wine cause people to lose their minds.  

No less fantastical was my next leg of the tour, where I entered imperial Rome.  Suetonius led me on a whistle stop tour of the personalities and cruelties of the emperors.  With glee he narrated the colourful tapestry of depravities and eccentricities that lie behind the stony marble facades that represent them today.  Augustus, usually heralded as a paragon of antique virtue had a penchant for sleeping with senator’s wives.  The quips of the Romans came to life, for example, Domitian was notorious for torturing flies to death for his pleasure.  When a courtier was asked if the anyone was in the emperor’s room, the quick-witted man replied, ‘not even a fly’.  Palace life took on more flesh and colour in the company of Robert Graves’ imaginative I Claudius.  Historians, philosophers and the saintly Germanicus were actors in a play controlled by the insidious Livia, Augustus’ wife and empress.  

Fatigued from the decadent capital, I decided to seek sanctuary on 7th century Lindisfarne in the company of St Cuthbert and Alistar Moffat.  I followed this brilliant author as he narrated his family history and reflections on mortality, as we tramped through the Scottish borders.  This is a place heavy with spirits from the pagan past and pockmarked by oases of calm and lasting historical memory.  Finally arriving at the island of the tides, a peace came over me from Moffat’s serene prose.  In this island off Northumberland, buffeted by howling North Sea winds and once by terrifying Vikings, an aura of harmony and satisfaction persists through the centuries.  

Suitably refreshed, I embarked on a trip to 19th Century St Petersburg in the care of Fydor Dostoyevsky.  I inhabited the psyche of Raskolnikov, a penniless student who murders two women.  He believed that his evil would be vindicated by the good he will do after stealing the women’s money to advance his career.  However, feverish guilt, anxiety and disgust at his actions overwhelm him.  In the background, Tsarist St Petersburg is a hellscape, sweltering hot and populated by bestial figures tarred by every vice.  The good are subjected to suffering and derision beneath a deaf heaven.  Despite his arc of redemption through Christianity, I found the conclusion completely unsatisfactory.  Raskolnikov’s murderous utilitarianism was not renounced because it was philosophically shown to be false, only bad for his soul.  

Jaded by the idea that most of what underlies our conception of morality and goodness does not exist on an objective footing, I wanted to seek purity.  To do so, I turned to Plato, the grandaddy of Western philosophy.  This great mind removed me from materiality itself and led me to a disembodied world of perfect ideas and forms.  This otherworldly experience must have been similar to that of Bezos and Branson when they beheld the curvature of the earth and the terrifying abyss of space.  Only without the need for millions of dollars to be incinerated.

Now back to ‘real’ life in rural England, with mostly restored health, I am planning what form my next summer should take.  As fascinating as this one was, I think I’ll do something more relaxing like go to Ibiza next time.