Time in the Time of Coronavirus

by Nancy Sackheim

Writers have a fitful relationship with the clock.  If the writing is going well, time flies.  If not, molasses in January moves faster.  If you've been having trouble writing during the pandemic, you may be reluctant to blame social distancing and/or isolation since writing, for the most part, is a solitary endeavor.  Nothing has changed.  Except everything has changed, including your relationship with time.

In Physics,  Aristotle posited that time does not exist without change.  Without change, an earlier 'now' and a later 'now' become one and the same.  Time is the observance of before and after, now and then, the beginning and the end. 

Arielle Pardes' in her Wired article "There Are No Hours of Day in Coronatime" writes, "The days blend together, the months lurch ahead, and we have no idea what time it is...In 2020, the coronavirus has become the fulcrum for change.  And along the way, something has happened to time.  The virus has created its own clock, and coronatime, there is less demarcation between a day and a week, a weekday and a weekend, the morning and night, the present and the recent past.  The days blend together , the months lurch ahead."

How can writers have any relationship with the clock, fitful or otherwise  if there is no longer anything to measure time against?  What if the clock/time is no longer a measurement of productivity?  Does it really matter? Does it matter how many words you've written in an hour, a day, a week or month if you've written a story that pleases you, that resonates with readers, that makes a difference?