by Meg Wade
I’ve had the words of John Donne in my head often as of late, that set of lines so classic they now mostly read as cliché:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
We don’t often ring bells for the dead anymore, so reflecting on these lines set me to wondering about the kinds of bells we do ring, at which point my thoughts drifted towards dismissal bells, though it’s been a long time since I’ve been in any kind of school setting. But my mind grabbed the notion of dismissal bells, attached it to the act of being laid off or let go, and then was filled with a cacophony of such bells ringing in recognition of these weeks of massive and haphazard federal firings. So if you’re looking for a new contemporary reading of Donne, there you go.
It seems, from doing a quick internet search on Donne in order to grab the above passage, that many a reader re-discovered him during the pandemic. His gesture in those particular lines towards mutual interdependence have, if I am honest, often felt a little abstract to me. But set in their broader context—a plague was sweeping through London and Donne himself was ill and potentially facing death when he wrote “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” in which they appear—they gain weight, and seem to have helped more than a few people face the hardest of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I think, though, that these lines have been calling to me in recent weeks not for any emotional resonance but because “No man is an island” sums up for me a whole body of literal physical, biological, and social truths. I take it to be an actual law of nature: we are not islands, but porous, interlocking beings. And I believe that unwanted, detrimental things happen when we fail to honor this truth. Despite that, an awful lot of people seem determined to do so in our current moment, be it ignoring such truths in everyday life (your average anti-housing NIMBYer) or stomping all over them at a systemic scale (your average corporate CEO).
