Day 17: A Time of Peace

Day 17: April 12, 2020
Global cases: 1,852,365; Deaths: 114,896
Egypt cases: 2,065; Deaths: 159

Mariam Ibrahim
English and Comparative Literature senior

I climbed out of bed at around 11 am today as I have done every day for a month now. I made coffee and sat perched on my bed going through my emails, my news feed and more.

I got dressed and walked to the nearest supermarket and picked up what I needed to make today’s concoction. I kneaded the dough and let it rest for two separate proof times and after four hours, I finally had bagels.

That’s when I realized, today I made bagels. Yesterday I made cake. The day before I labored over English muffins for two days in a row simply because I had the time. I have not baked since the ninth grade.

I enrolled in the International Baccalaureate and graduated high school with two diplomas. When I registered at AUC, one major simply was not enough. Two was lackluster, and I finally settled on a double major and a minor. My studies had to be as challenging as high school.

If I wasn’t growing newer streaks of grey hair from the stress, or I went home and had no impending sense of tardiness, I was not working hard enough.

I have been operating solely on stress since 11th grade. When I finally found the time to finish what I needed and my anxiety subdued for my finite hours of sleep, I could finally dub my peace as achievement.

I enrolled in English Comparative Literature because it had always been my passion to read. I’d read two and sometimes even three books over the span of two weeks because I was so enamored by the notion.

For The Caravan‘s previous diary entries in Arabic and English go to our COVID-19 Special Coverage page.

It was such an all-encompassing experience for me, I had to pursue it further. My studies over the past year have consisted mainly of reading academic papers that taught one how to read correctly, the “true” literature one must continuously be in search of, and the integral nature of literature in our beings.

I can earnestly say I have not truly read a novel in a year, however.

I was being taught how to classify proper literature from improper, how I’m supposed to consume this literature if one were to find it and how to truly excavate its meaning. Yet, I have not been given the breadth to simply sit down and consume aforementioned literature.

In literary criticism, there is a theory called “The Implied Reader”. If a text is truly a piece of masterful literature, then it can never be consumed the same twice.

Therefore, it brings out a different reader in you every time you consume it as you discover new meanings that may have escaped you due to age or circumstance.

In a sense, this quarantine has become such a text. Large sub-groups have been so adamant in dictating how we should experience this quarantine.

The emphasis on picking up new skills or polishing old ones. For environmentalists it’s the break the earth needed from us. For the spiritual it’s a sign that we simply weren’t living life correctly.

For those with milestones it’s been a time to mourn their losses and process the emotions linked so resolutely with graduation. For others it’s been a time to re-evaluate priorities. For me, it’s oddly been a time of peace.

It’s been a time to sit with a novel for hours, experiment with baking, and even go for a jog at sunset. By some means, this quarantine is more or less the world’s text. It will extrapolate whatever form of implied leader resides within you based on circumstance, and as the years elapse, differing circumstantial implied readers will materialize.

For whatever reason, however, it seems to be assuredly an entity that morphs into precisely what every person needs at this moment in time.