The French mathematician, physicist and inventor Pascal once wrote that “All the problems of mankind come from the inability of man to sit quietly in a room alone.” In times of unprecedented, like the one we are experiencing in the last year, many would argue that the last thing anyone needs is more time for self-reflection, but Pascal may have been right in what he said.
It is enough to look at the past and other moments of pandemic in the history of humanity and to understand that for some great personalities the quarantine and isolation were the most productive periods of their lives.
Alexander Pushkin
In the autumn of 1830, the most famous poet of Russia, the Alexander Pushkin, was found isolated in Boldino, his family estate in the southeastern part of the Nizhny Novgorod region. From there he was to fly to Moscow for his wedding, but a cholera outbreak kept him trapped in Boldino for three months. The months that Pushkin stayed in Boldino proved to be the most productive period of his career, as the eminent Russian author completed his novel Eugene Onegin and the short story cycle The Belkin Tales, short tragedies and over thirty poems.
Isaac Newton
The Great Plague of 1665-1666 was the worst outbreak in Britain since the Black Death of 1347. After London, the epidemic spread to other British cities, such as Cambridge, forcing the famous University to close. its operation. The 22-year-old was also studying at that time. Isaac Newton. After dropping out of school, Newton returned to his family home, the Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. This period, and another that passed at Woolsthorpe in the spring of 1667, have become known as the “time of miracles”, during which he began working on the many theories that would later shape our understanding of the laws of nature. Freed from the obligations of university life, Newton had time to devote himself to a period of productive solitary study where he developed theories of reason, motion, and optics, as well as the laws of motion and gravity. It was then that he witnessed the fall of an apple from the apple tree in Woolsthorpe’s garden, which inspired him to formulate the law of universal gravity.
Shakespeare
If an element determined his life and work Shakespeare this is definitely the plague. In 1564, three months after his birth, the Stratford-Upon-Avon register records the onset of the plague. Four of Shakespeare’s brothers succumbed to the disease, as well as Hammet’s only son, and in the future his professional life would be disrupted by outbreaks and outbreaks of the disease. In an effort to “flatten the curve”, the outbreak of 1603 had brought a directive that closed children’s theaters when more than 30 deaths related to the disease were recorded within a week. By July 1606, death rates forced Shakespeare to close his theater, The Globe. As an actor, Shakespeare could not work from home, but as a playwright and poet he could continue his work. During the 1606 epidemic, according to author James Sapiro in Lear’s Year, he claimed that Shakespeare wrote three of his most famous tragedies: King Lear, Macbeth and Anthony, and Cleopatra.
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