I don’t know about you, but when things are bad, my motto is that misery loves company. When everything fell apart with the coronavirus, in the absence of living miserable human company, right off the bat I read Daniel Defoe’s journal of the plague year from the 1600s. When we moved into isolation to save ourselves, the severe and bizarre desert fathers, the earliest Christian monastic movement, would take me 10,000 steps farther to choosing to live one’s whole life in a 10’ square cell. Times get bad, and I want the company of detailed histories of past miseries.