what is the most unknown riddle in the world

So, I closed up the gap in the chairs, just to look out on something resembling the normal spring in my yard. But after a few weeks, as the daffodils began to show a little color, that didn’t seem like such a good idea. Back in late March, once the snow melted away, I put out two lawn chairs, six feet apart, thinking that I’d have a friend over now and again they could bring their own tea in a thermos, I thought, or a beer. What must be endured, what can’t be endured. And, hard as it is, I’m not sure where its borders lie. As I move deeper into it, I worry that it will replace all the subtle textures of the solitude into which I’ve grown over the last thirty years. Now, as I go through the familiar motions of routine in an altered world, I find myself conscious of absences, especially of the sounds that filtered in behind me as I worked-morning traffic, neighbors walking their dogs, children chattering on their way to the school at the end of the street-which marked the patterns of other people’s days, and defined my life, too. I began to realize just how much my solitude had existed within a larger web that I could see and hear and feel. But as the pandemic unfolded, and the days became more and more freighted with the unknown, the solitude I’d worked so long to establish began to feel threatened by something I can’t quite name.

I settled into work as usual, and even welcomed the greater stillness, which seemed to enlarge the sense of spaciousness in my home. The outside world was just a little quieter, muffled as though it were a Sunday in deep winter. At first, daily life didn’t feel all that different to me.

I live in a modest-sized Maine town and, when our library closed, back in mid-March, I began to isolate myself in earnest. I could anticipate its changing textures: the welcome intensity of it after coming home from a day of obligations, its starkness after the departure of a friend. I came to feel at home in my solitude, having made peace with the way it isn’t predictably stable-with how I’d sometimes slip into it easily, at other times pacing in it, stalked by a restlessness that took effort to shake. What was I going to do with all that time and space? Since then, in many ways, I’ve sought to build my life around the possibilities I discovered in that cabin, to carve out a world for thought, spending most of each day working in a quiet I built for myself. The quiet and solitude of my time at MacDowell was an inquiry into a life I wanted to lead, and a challenge. I was in my early thirties, and just beginning my serious attempts at writing, working in snatched time in the hours before my day jobs in bookstores and commercial kitchens. But those six weeks meant far more to me. Residencies like MacDowell are often described as “retreats,” which implies a welcome escape from life, or a withdrawal. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. We gossiped and swapped stories, etching rumor into myth: the woman who had chained herself to her desk in a desperate attempt to stay, a man who fled the quiet-or maybe the trees? Looking back now, I marvel at how quickly a feeling of community took hold, abetted, I’m guessing, by our common purpose, our separateness from our usual lives, and the solitude of our days. I’d quickly learned to identify one novelist’s laugh, and to expect a certain painter’s smell of woodsmoke. Even so, I loved the intimacy of that meal with others. Often, my work still filled my head and, as I emerged from the pines into the open field and saw the bright lights of the dining room in the distance, I felt as if I had to break through a pane of glass to join in. I scanned the sky for Venus and the first glimmerings of Orion. One of the things I loved was the sense of safety I felt in the darkening woods. Most days, I kept to myself.Įach evening, I walked half a mile to our communal dinner, the quiet magnifying every sound: the door shutting behind me, my footfalls crunching on the frozen road. We could visit each other-the kettle came with two cups-but not without an expressed invitation.

That winter, there were about fifteen of us in cabins scattered through the woods. I’d arrived at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire, which had been supporting writers, composers, painters, and sculptors since 1906. It stood in a small clearing just off a muddy road: one room that contained almost all a writer needed then-a scratched table in front of a window, a rocking chair beside a fireplace, a bookcase, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a teakettle. For six weeks during the late winter of 1989, I had a cabin in the woods to call my own.

What is the most unknown riddle in the world