From Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

I'm trying to find ways to distract myself from the (still expanding) sickness that is killing too many people far too quickly. I'm trying to distract myself from the dull and constant certainty that the level of infection could have been slowed significantly (if the Chinese government hadn't tried to repress the truth about the spread of this disease in their country, and if our federal government could have intervened immediately, like they did in the case of Ebola). But it is not productive to look backwards. The reality of now is that too many people are still getting sick, and too many people are dying.

There are people who try to see an upside of being isolated during this pandemic. I too have tried to see an upside, but the only upside I can see is that there are people I care about who are not infected, and that there are people I care about who have recovered. What I mostly see is the growing gravity of now.

I rejoined Facebook. I needed to have some personal contact with the world outside my household. My old Facebook friends are as active as ever; some of them posting uplifting things which actually do lift my spirits from moment to moment. But the feeling really only lasts a moment.

I like to imagine a future where we can play music together again, but I fear that the changes that will happen in the musical world after the virus has been eradicated will be lasting. It took more than ten years for musical life in my part of the country to recover from the audience loss that happened as a result of the recession. How can we be sure that people who like to go to concerts will have the money to support performing organizations, or even buy tickets, once we are able to play concerts again?

The online professional musical possibilities for musicians are expanding, I guess. More and more people are figuring out how to teach through various video platforms. Some people boast of their great success. What if this becomes the new normal after the virus is gone? What will happen to the profound kinds of musical interactions that happen between students and teachers when they can play together and make one another's instruments vibrate because of resonance. Not being able to really hear what is coming out of a student's instrument because of the lack of high-quality reception means that I am not able to accurately tell if a solution I suggest is really working. Do other people experience this as a frustration, or am I just a fish out of water, a relic of an older kind of musical life.

And now is as good a time as any for a passage of Pessoa:

I'm like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit--the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don't know my worth, there's nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image--not without truth, but with lies mixed in--I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to whom I am, even if it's nothing. And a hint of tears that weren't cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn't felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don't even know what I would have cried over, if I'd cried, nor why it is that I didn't cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.
[Section 193 of "A Factless Autobiography" translated by Richard Zenith]