The Pandemic Diaries
Wellesley
Summer 2021
The past year has been extraordinary. The COVID-19 pandemic has utterly recast all our lives—how we work and learn, play and pray—and it has been going on so long now that in the United States it has begun to feel, if not normal, at least “ordinary.”
“We love, we hate, we covet, all in privacy and solitude,” Daniel Defoe wrote, of the alienation that stems from isolation, in his novel/memoir of the London Plague of 1665. One way humans have tried to fill that solitude is through personal journals. Many of us found ourselves in the early days of lockdown searching for solace in the great literature of pandemics. Sales of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’ The Plague (another novel in the style of a diary) soared, as have recent novels that chronicle pandemics, including Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Severance by Ling Ma. Some of us began keeping diaries, or, if we were already diarists, we began keeping them religiously.
For Wellesley anthropology professor Anastasia Karakasidou, the personal journal is an important tool both for people trying to make sense of their place in the world and for the academic trying to make sense of a society at a particular moment in history. For nearly 20 years, Karakasidou has made use of journals as part of her teaching and research into the cultures of cancer, drawing participants from Wellesley, China, and her native Greece.
So when the pandemic hit, she knew instantly what she must do. “I felt the best way for me to deal with this is to teach a class on pandemics,” she says. “The students are the greatest resources I have in my life right now to make sense of the virus.”
