"The Long Experience of Love": Meditations on Breath and Beauty amidst a Pandemic

Breathing is one of the natural rhythms we all experience as embodied creatures. As an involuntary function, like our heartbeat, we rarely think about it, pulsing as it does in obedience to an inner necessity through the minutes and hours of our days and nights. It asks little of us, requires no special attention, and functions without need of our intention. Breathing simply is, whether or not we are aware of it; as an ancient adage puts it, playing on the near echo of otherwise unrelated Latin verbs, dum spiramus, speramus: "While we breathe, we hope." The poet Rainer Maria Rilke went so far as to praise breath in the opening lines of one of his Sonnets to Orpheus (1922):

Breath, you invisible poem!Steadily, for the sake of its ownbeing, pure displaced space. Counterweightwithin which I rhythmically come to be.¹

But what happens as this "poem" fades, when our health fails us? What transpires when we find our breathing compromised or even extinguished by forces within or external to our bodies? To be "out of breath" in moments of excitement or physical exertion is one thing, but the trauma of facing the final loss of one's breath is a matter of another magnitude, a terror only those who have faced it can know.

As the coronavirus COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc with human life across the inhabited parts of this earth, it does so without regard to persons. It is no respecter of status. An invading airborne army of microbes, invisible to the eye, it needs our bodies as a habitat for its own survival. As it spreads from body to body among us, it brings with it a weight of unwanted divisions into our lives. It separates us from those we love and restricts our motions. In extreme cases, the sense of isolation brought on by the safeguards we observe triggers a sense of loneliness, leaving many among us with an unwanted and often unmanageable burden of psychological suffering. As it stalks our bodies, whether in cities and towns or in more remote places, we have become adept at masking our faces to limit the exchange of breath. We try to maintain a proper "social distance" from each other as a safeguard, knowing that an airborne virus is a stealth agent in our midst.

The anxiety all this produces reflects a deeper fear of the relinquishment being forced upon us, an apt word given its derivation from the Latin relinquere, meaning to "leave behind" or "forsake"—in this case, nothing less than the ordinary rhythms of our lives. In extreme cases, of course, the loss can amount to nothing less than the gift of life itself, as measured by the rhythm of our breathing, since in its most virulent forms this disease attacks the respiratory system to the point that it can still the lungs altogether. Indeed, it would not be inappropriate to suggest that this virus has imposed on our public and private lives an unchosen—and, for most of us, an unwanted—asceticism, requiring discipline and varying degrees of self-denial in the ways we have learned to isolate and protect ourselves and others from its reach.

Through the long season of its siege, this virus has also slowed our lives in dramatic ways. Once the severity of the disease became evident in its global reach, in the spring of 2020, air travel came to a nearly complete standstill. Almost overnight the sky's vast stretch of blue became devoid of the web of condensation trails, or "contrails," left by jets in their race through the upper atmosphere. The grinding sound of the combustion engines driving cars and trucks became noticeable by its diminishment. Gas prices began their freefall as the normal supply far exceeded demand, and the quality of the air around the globe improved measurably. It felt as if the earth itself was breathing more easily, with an almost palpable sense of relief—and we, with it. If the adage is true, that "every cloud has a silver lining...