Quarantine

People are shocked when I tell them I prepared the slide deck for my funeral. What else was left to do during quarantine? COVID was a nightmare we have woken up from, it will be remembered differently by different people depending on their experiences. I hope future historians will not be harsh on our generation because we do not have their hindsight or the larger picture. We lived day to day, making the best of a bad situation. Mask-wearing and obsessive hand sanitizing have become second nature to many, while social distancing, face shields, and unconscionable corruption during the pandemic are now faded memories. More than COVID, quarantine was my most memorable experience simply because solitude is nearly impossible to attain in Metro Manila today.

Walking along deserted Ayala Avenue to the drug store or grocery was like being in a dystopian movie. The sky had taken on a clean blue hue, and from my Makati study, I could clearly see all the way to Antipolo. Chirping of birds by my bedroom window was my alarm clock. No traffic, noise, nor pollution. All positive quarantine experiences are now history.

COVID hit me twice, I was completely asymptomatic unlike others less fortunate who died from it or survived to endure its long aftereffects. People think my happy quarantine experience weird or nerdy, they have to understand that solitude is second-nature to historians, writers, and ex-monks like myself.

Two months on, my only issue with quarantine was when to step out of my study into sunlight.

Quarantine also provided a foretaste of senior citizenship. My desk and pocket planners devoid of appointments became some of the wasted investments of 2020. Retirement does not mean sitting around waiting in the pre-departure area of free movies and discounted fastfood, it means being able to choose what I want to do.

Suddenly, with no classes to teach, no meetings to attend, no museums to visit, no archives and libraries to dig into, no long chatty dinners to attend, the only things that remained constant in quarantine were meals and my Inquirer column deadlines on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Quarantine taught me that I don’t need a blue moon or the right mood to write. The only inspiration is the deadline.

Quarantine was like pressing the reset button on my laptop, wiping out much of what I was working on (with the assurance that it can be retrieved on Mac Time Machine). Unfortunately, the clean slate led to a reset of my body clock: I would stay up all night, go to bed at 6 or 7 a.m., wake up for lunch at 2 p.m. (Spanish time), take a long siesta, and wake up in time for dinner at 8. What did I do all night? I surfed the internet and downloaded materials from: the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid, the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, or the website of the historian of the United States state department in Washington. I could do this because even before quarantine, I would set aside nights to binge on Netflix without guilt and consume an entire series of “The Crown,” “Designated Survivor” (the US, not the Korean version), “Money Heist,” “House of Flowers,” “Fake or Fortune,” etc. Netflix was also a way to brush up on my rusty French and Spanish. Watching films in their original versions with audio description mode and English subtitles insured that words and phrases that escaped my ears could be read by my eyes.

Quarantine was an excuse to reorganize my library. I pulled out many duplicates, titles I think I may not read or need in the next decade, and rare volumes that I have in PDF and stored in a precious external drive. Books culled were sold online. I carved out more shelf space by stacking two rows of books per shelf, with some system to help me remember what was hidden from view in the back of the shelf. If I move house or renovate, I will have custom built shelves deep enough to contain two rows of books. Each shelf will be tiered, with the back row raised six inches to allow me to read the titles of books hidden by books on the front row. After the books came the files that no one else can organize. This brought to light many things I have been looking for, and sometimes surprised me to discover things I forgot I had.

Speaking of books, some of my latest books were born in quarantine: “Yaman: History and Heritage in Philippine Money” (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, 2021), “Queridas de Rizal: Looking Back 16” (Anvil, 2021), and “Cabinet of Curiosities: History from Philippine Artifacts” (Anvil, 2023). In between my own books, I annotated a new edition of Nick Joaquin’s “Rizal in Saga” (Milflores, 2021), put together and coedited a volume on Philippines-Czech historical and cultural relations. I resumed work on my “Bibliografia Rizalina,” a calendar of all extant Rizal material known to me, about 95 percent of which I have physically seen and handled over the last 40 years. I resumed annotating the handwritten diaries of Ferdinand Marcos that I have been planning to publish before pandemic struck. My website will soon be up.

My most important quarantine tasks were drafting a will and designing a slide deck for my funeral. The latter could not be left to my nieces who, for fun, may choose unflattering or wacky pictures. Preparation extends life because the Grim Reaper picks on the unwary, and often skips those prepared to meet him.

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