There I was alone in my study on Thursday when who should ghost into the room (through one of its walls) but the fabled American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).
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Let me explain this scarcely-to-be-believed event.
In last Saturday's unforgettable column I urged we all use this sudden boon of indoor spare time to take on self-improving projects. I reported that one of my QPs (quarantine projects) is to at last study the poet Emily Dickinson. My shameful ignorance of her, surely the English language's most-read poet, had begun to haunt me.
In my nightmares, the AFP's Serious Literary Ignorance Squad constable stopped me on suspicion and gave me the literary equivalent of a breath test.
"Sir, please finish the following very famous Dickinson line for me. 'There's a certain slant of light, summer afternoons ...' Don't know it Sir? 'Fraid you'll have to come down the station with me."
But now my Emily QP is under way and I am immersed in her works. And it is such a crush that on Thursday I thought I'd try to contact her. I went to the How to Hold Your Own Séance blog (for learning how to do séances is another of my QPs). Suddenly, in she shimmered!
She was on a mission, alarmed at the plights of tourists who have been stuck on noxious ocean cruises. She wants people to stop doing something so dangerous (and banal) when, by being at home reading a book, one can have far better, far safer adventures. So she asked could I amend the opening line of her famous poem 'There is no frigate like a book/To take us Lands away' and then circulate the amended poem (with its timely, eternal advice) to this column's global readership.
I leap to oblige her. Readers, when you go to the sage little poem online, be sure when you read and circulate it, you now have it begin "There is no Cruise Ship like a Book/To take us Lands away ..."
For her poem's insight that books of fiction have the power to take the imaginative reader to places way beyond the ranges of mere transports has special relevance for our trapped-indoors times. And there are reports that e-book purchases of fiction are going gangbusters.
Having secured my promise, suddenly, with a soft swish of ectoplasm, she was gone. I had been about to ask her if another opening of her poem might go "There is no Cruise Ship like the Internet/To take us Lands away ..."?
For the Internet bristles now with opportunities to (virtually) go to places far away. Already today I have been on a virtual tour of the Edward Hopper galleries in New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, following that with a brisk virtual Walking Tour Of Edward Hopper's New York.
If the name of the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) rings bells it's because you're bound to have seen somewhere his haunting masterpiece Nighthawks. It depicts a few forlorn souls languishing in a New York diner very, very late at night.
It is another of my QPs to get to better know Hopper and coincidentally he is newsy now because his famous portrayals of lonely people in lonely rooms seem so appropriate to what's befallen us.
"We are all Edward Hopper paintings now," The Guardian insists. "Is he the artist of the coronavirus age?"
And because there is no cruise ship like the internet I have just been enabled to have the aforementioned two Hopper-rich New York experiences.
Meanwhile, in another adaptation to this emergency, many orchestras are offering online virtual seats at performances, now that real bums cannot be put on actual seats.
I have availed myself of this miracle. And yet ...
Just four weeks ago, just before dashing home from New Zealand in a COVID-19 hurry, I attended a live performance by the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra in Auckland's dear old (1911) Town Hall.
Ah, the roar of the music, the smell of the audience! A spellbinding reminder of how live classical music, live rugby league, live walks through Hopper's New York, live everything, is best.
From my great seat in a Town Hall gallery I saw the perspiration on the upper lip of the athletic harpist, the flexings of the busy forearm muscles on the luminously white arms of the short-sleeved percussionist, the meaningful looks between the two lovers, Tarquin (not his real name) in the strings, and Peregrine (not his real name either) with the woodwind.
Then, something else one can't do at home at a virtual concert, there was the live experience of using the dear building's lovingly preserved, 1911 heritage gentlemen's lavatory. It is a wonderland of ceramic whiteness with old-fashioned tall-sided urinal spaces that somehow wrap a chap in ceramic privacy.
Thinking, now, about that wonderful evening, I realise that only live performances can, later, generate such nostalgia. Virtual concerts, sterile occasions, just can't do it.
As, quarantined and woebegone, I sit here alone in my study looking out the window at my bleak street, remembering Auckland, pining for the lost days of live music in throbbing venues, I realise I have become a Hopper painting.
