I Think We’re Alone Now
Editor’s note, Issue 1
Illustration by Peter Hamilton
When the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, there was a sense of surrealism in the public mind. With no frame of reference for an outbreak of this magnitude, our minds filled in the gaps with fear, confusion, or doubt, making each report on the news approximating Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. By April, not only was the coronavirus here, but it was omnipresent, on every unsanitized surface and behind every mask.
In this time of collective loneliness and upheaval, we wanted to launch a magazine that offers a chance to look inward and outward simultaneously. Where we can immerse ourselves into poetry as a respite (pp. 8, 19, 24), collectively bemoan the delay of baseball as the virus chips away at another simple pleasure (p. 12), or even embark on a haircutting adventure (p. 5).
Our regular schedules are splintering. Days have started blending together (p. 20). T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock might have preferred coffee, but across the globe people have started measuring out their lives in spoonfuls of sourdough starters.
Baking has achieved a new rank of celebrity, and mixing cocktails, dubbed “quarantinis” are making a comeback. In fact, this issue shares a couple of recipes that might help take the edge off (p. 31).
We may be isolated as never before, but our loneliness and longing are felt everywhere, as evidenced by the talented contributors who made this magazine possible, giving voice to the swirling emotions inside each of us.
There will come a time to put our suits back on, to kiss our loved ones goodbye and emerge from our front doors like Superman emerging from a phone booth, ready to face the day in our offices. For now, our lives have become jazz improvisations, replacing the familiar melody and tempo with something as novel as this virus itself.
With so much focus on the confinement of being at home, let’s ponder the freedom it offers. The freedom to connect with ourselves through art and literature, the freedom to connect with each other on a different level.
We invite you to use The Quarantine Review as a map, a guide, a log, a message in a bottle. Join us in that interlude between answering work emails and deciding what to binge-watch or that twilight when the kids are finally in bed and before sleep comes for you.