How long will the melancholy of a year in isolation last?

Like many people who grew up in the Great Depression, my grandmother couldn’t abide waste, and she saved odd bits of string for which she had no use. It was the mentality of her era, though she had in fact lived comfortably enough through the Depression. Those impulses did not stem from rational fear, but from a neurosis about the possibility of deprivation: She would always know that having enough at the moment was no guarantee of future sufficiency.

It’s hard to know how the pandemic will affect us over the long term, but we will not emerge from it without some comparable, persistent, low-grade anxieties. We won’t save bits of string and inelastic rubber bands, but we will do something equally pointless. We might be suspicious of travel; we might be panicked by crowds; we might put on masks long after herd immunity has made them all but gratuitous. Collective trauma affects both the group mentality and that of individuals. We might be ill at ease if our children live or work in tall buildings with crowded elevators.

Those children may think us ridiculous, but we have learned that liberties that appear immutable can be constrained, that freedom of movement is conditional, that scourges can sweep across an unsuspecting world completely out of the blue, that what seems mundane today may be impossible next month. It will take decades to outgrow these qualms, and, of course, by then there will presumably be other crises, now neither anticipated nor imaginable, that will channel anxieties we haven’t yet conceived.