On Quarantine
It was 1448, and the first global pandemic — the bubonic plague — was ravaging Europe.
Most attempts to curb its spread were distinctly medieval. Potions laced with arsenic and mercury. Leeching. Rubbing wounds with live chickens.
One measure, however, proved effective. To protect the Italian port city of Venice, the Venetian senate instituted a policy that any ship entering the harbor must wait for forty days — quaranta giorni — before coming ashore. This prescribed forty day period forms the linguistic roots of today’s all-too-familiar “quarantine.”
Quarantine is a cruel isolation. It is not penal, not a punishment for any transgression. It is not natural, not being trapped underground after a cave-in or lost at sea after a storm. It is distinctly social — a community’s decree that one must be cast out, for a time, for its own protection. That one is a threat not through their own agency but by their mere existence.
Quarantine is a piercing uncertainty. Life’s infinite paths narrow to two roads — health and illness — and each day we progress not knowing which we are on. The world compresses from stereo to mono, from technicolor to black and white. Yesterday we were flooded with external stimuli, today we are forced to draw only from the well of our own fragile mind.
The forty day quarantine, Venice’s quaranta giorni — this isolation, this uncertainty — has its deepest roots though not as a medical practice, but a spiritual one.
In religions across the world, “forty days” is used to represent any long period of isolation, threat, and transformation. Noah endures forty days of rain during the great flood. Goliath challenges the Israelites for forty days before David emerges. Elijah walks for forty days and nights in the desert before arriving at mount Horeb. Christ ascends to heaven forty days after his resurrection. The Sufi chilla is a forty day spiritual retreat in which one is alone and withdrawn from the world. In some versions of the story, Buddha meditates under the bodhi tree for forty days before achieving enlightenment.
And as it stands today, it’s looking like the Bay Area shelter in place order will last almost precisely forty days.
A true quarantine, in the oldest sense of the word. Forty days of danger, of threat, of uncertainty. But also of discovery, of opportunity.
This is not the way we envisioned our spring MBA2 year would go. But it also creates precisely the spiritual challenge we came to business school to consider.
In school we role-play firing employees and negotiating with co-founders. Quarantine demands daily difficult conversations with our friends, roommates, and partners about the most personal topics — safety, money, health, values.
In school we learn about building strong, lasting connections and relationships. Quarantine demands daily nurturing of our relationships under the most inhospitable circumstances — without context, without presence, without sports to talk about or dinners to share.
In school we speculate where our morals lie on the spectrum between selfishness and sacrifice. Quarantine demands daily resolve in service of these morals.
Quarantine’s physical restriction requires, perhaps engenders, spiritual maturation.
Quarantine is stagnation, and yet quarantine is transformation. From sickness to health. From threat to triumph.
Quarantine is inactivity, and yet quarantine is a journey. From chaos to clarity. From wandering to wisdom.
Noah survives his quaranta giorni to find a cleansed world. David emerges a hero to his people. Elijah returns a prophet. Christ ascends.
In our quarantine we must build our arc. We must face our Goliath. We must travel through our psychological desert and find our Horeb.
This virus, this quarantine, will be our nadir, as individuals, as a GSB community, as a global tribe. But it can also be our apotheosis. Our chance to unite under the common banner of humanity. To emerge to a world cleansed of collective indifference. To a newfound respect for our unsung heroes — nurses, schoolteachers, grocery store clerks. To a resounding trust in our under-appreciated prophets — scientists, researchers, public health officials. And to a new sense of ourselves — of our values, of our resilience, of our rich, whole inner being.
Quarantine will be our forty days. Our struggle. But it must also be our salvation.
