The Daily - Special Episode: A Bit of Relief

Episode Date: March 14, 2020

We’re in a moment that feels scary, uncertain and unsettling, and may feel this way for a while. While we’ll continue to cover the coronavirus pandemic until it’s over, we realize that this time requires more than news and information. We also need release — and relief. And we’ll do our best to provide that in the coming weeks. To start, we asked a few of our colleagues at The Times to share what’s bringing them comfort right now. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.Guests:Taffy Brodesser-Akner reads from “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez.Wesley Morris reads from “In Pursuit of Flavor” by Edna Lewis.Dean Baquet reads from “On Living in an Atomic Age” by C.S. Lewis.

Hey, it's Michael. This has been an intense week. It's a scary, uncertain, and unsettled moment. And it's going to feel that way for a while. Of course, we're going to keep covering this pandemic until it's over. But this moment requires more than news and information. We also need release and relief. And we're going to be trying to provide that too in the coming weeks.

Okay, guys, I'm recording something for the daily. So can everyone be really quiet, like little mice. To start, we asked a few of our colleagues to share what they're turning to right now for comfort. It's Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. I'm a writer at the magazine. I am in my home office. I have been stuck inside my home for several days. I have socially distanced within an inch of my life, and my husband and I are working from home at the same time, which is a new dynamic in our marriage. In the last few days, every email and text message I get or send is something in the time of coronavirus.

So I've been thinking a lot about Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. That is not how you say his name. Okay, so I'm going to start reading now, okay? She clung to her husband, and it was just at the time when he needed her most because he suffered the disadvantage of being 10 years ahead of her as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age, with the even greater disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was. In the end, they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for 30 years, they were uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other's thoughts without intending to. Or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say.

Together, they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered. They were on the other shore. The thing that strikes me about this particular passage is that we are talking so much right now about the way that we should distance ourselves from each other.

But there is no quarantine yourself from your spouse. And the unspoken assignment to that is, listen, you have a few weeks here. We don't know how long, but you have a few weeks where you don't have plans and you don't have to get anyone out the door. And I wonder if this is also a time when we find a kind of regularity and love to each other that we most of the time take for granted. I'm Wesley Morris, and I am a critic at The New York Times. And I'll be reading from Edna Lewis's, the great Edna Lewis's 1988 cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor. Edna Lewis, for anybody who doesn't know, and shame on you for not knowing. Not really. Edna Lewis for anybody who doesn't know and shame on you for not knowing not really but she is one of our great cookbook writers

one of our great thinkers about keeping certain black cooking traditions alive and she means a lot to me partly because there's a kind of comedy involved in the Edna Lewis experience which is that she can give you a recipe but she also gives you a story. And sometimes you have to cook from instinct. But today, I'm not even going to tell

you how to make a meal. I'm going to read an entry from In Pursuit of Flavor, simply called Storing Food in the Refrigerator. Edna writes, chilled, and begin to sprout in the refrigerator and lose flavor. Fruits and berries, cakes and breads, which keep fine in a cool pantry if properly covered and wrapped, should be permitted to sit at room temperature before being eaten to give their flavors time to come out. Milk and cream should of course be kept very cold. I pour milk and cream from the cardboard or plastic cartons into glass bottles. Glass holds the cold much better. And as soon as I get cream from the cardboard or plastic cartons into glass bottles. Glass holds the cold much better. And as soon as I get home from the market, I unwrap fish, poultry, and meat and re-wrap it in fresh wax paper and foil. I take out whatever I find in the cavity of the chicken and wipe the

whole chicken with a damp cloth. I do the same for the meat. I refrigerate the well-wrapped food in lidded non-aluminum metal or enamel containers, which conduct cold air very well. I think it's particularly important to remove plastic wrapping from meats, fruits, and vegetables. Plastic is about the worst conductor for cold air, and foods just seem to heat up the minute they're put in plastic. I've found that fresh produce such as salad greens wilt more quickly in the plastic vegetable bins found in most new refrigerators. And so I always try to replace mine with enamel or glass containers.

That's Edna Lewis telling you in these times of peril, but not panic, how to make room in your fridge for all the food that you're buying too much of at the supermarket right now. Good luck and God bless. And finally, a passage from another time about another crisis that felt especially right for this moment. I'm Dean Barkay, the executive editor of The New York Times. This is a passage from an essay written by C.S. Lewis called On Living in an Atomic Age. In one way, we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb.

How are we to live in an atomic age, I'm tempted to reply. Why, as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year. Or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night. Or indeed, as you were already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents. In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented, and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.

We had indeed one very great advantage over our ancestors, anesthetics. But we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis,

chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies. A microbe can do that. But they need not dominate our minds. Be safe out there. Take care. Thank you.