Time and distance

Abstract

This short perspective offers meditations on our shared sense of time and distance under the global COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. It suggests that different kinds of storytelling, including on social media, offered people helpful ways of shaping time, feeling connected, and making it from day to day. Poetic forms, too, provided frameworks for a better understanding of the crisis. The article draws first from research on young South Africans’ experiences of being isolated and apart, and on the media that helped them cope. It then turns to the author’s own responses through creative writing and history to lockdown conditions of distant proximity. It ends by considering how writing about being at distance, became itself a way of reflecting on and managing distance.