Essay Back in January, at Stanford University, where I teach and practice psychiatry, I showed my students a slide of an oak tree from the edge of campus. At first the photo seemed out of place. The course, “PSYC82: The Literature of Psychosis,” is about the portrayal of psychosis in memoir and fiction, art and film; the lecture that day was a survey of psychiatric history. But there is growing evidence linking green space to mental well-being, and I have become increasingly concerned for my students, who, studies show, are experiencing depression and anxiety at record rates.
I wanted them to get outside. The winter had been mild, a new round of rains had just passed through, and the woods were beautiful. In the three years I have taught this course, this was the first time I thought to show such photos. But as the quarter progressed, I found myself returning to images I had collected over weekend walks.
Photos of bay laurels from the Stanford hills, of turkey tail fungi fanning over mossy logs, of gleaming slime molds and iridescent ferns. They served, at first, as a respite from some of the dense and difficult narratives we were reading, as well as from the darkening mood and news from the world outside our classroom. But as time went on, the students found connections between these images of nature and the stories in our class: the birds that call to Septimus Smith in “Mrs. Dalloway,” the “happy hollow of a tree” that shelters Edgar-as-Tom in “King Lear,” even the flight into the Californian foothills in the science fiction classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
” And they pointed out the importance of nature for the confined narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or the current reality of hundreds of thousands of people with severe mental illness locked up in penal institutions far away from any green. As the narrator of Georg Büchner’s 1839 novella “Lenz” declares, “If I couldn’t get out on to a mountain occasionally and see the landscape all around, then come back home and walk through the garden and look inside through the window — I’d go mad! mad! ” We were reading Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” when the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Washington State, Philip K.
Dick’s “Ubik” when the first case of community transmission was reported in California. On March 2, with nine cases reported in Santa Clara County, I began to record lectures on “King Lear,” so students could watch from their dorm rooms. We had made it to Edgar’s soliloquy when face-to-face classes were canceled. Onto Zoom we went; I gave my final lecture in the silence of my living room.
Group Text “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” will spark lively conversation among people who have run out of things to say. Welcome to Group Text, a mo...
Class, it seemed, was over. Students began to leave, first on their own, then on the university’s order. There remained only the matter of the exams. Almost immediately people began to whisper of the possibility that winter finals would be canceled.
I hesitated. However trivial a final may seem in the context of world events, canceling one means far more than canceling a test. A final exam is more than just part of the key struggle to retain some kind of normality in the face of chaos. A final represents an opportunity to synthesize knowledge, to bring together readings and concepts from across the term.
If one believes in the significance of one’s material, then this synthesis is a critical moment of a course. And so first I made the examination optional, then open book; the date of the exam was postponed twice. It was hard not to feel that I was negotiating with the growing epidemic.
“And then, as student after student emailed, describing challenges returning home, I realized it was time to admit defeat.”
As I wrote my letter to my students explaining the cancellation, I paused. It’s a large class, and during the week’s upheaval, I wondered where they had gone: the students who came laughing into class together, or sat quietly in back; who shared stories of their own struggles with mental illness; who turned in recorded songs for their assignments; who introduced me to books I had never read. So instead of ending class altogether, I gave them one last assignment: Go outside and take a photo of the natural world we had talked about so often, and share it with others in the class. That night, after the Zoom meetings, the spring course prep, the planning updates from the hospital and the brief moments stolen outside, I logged on to our course website.
So chaotic have the days become that I had almost forgotten the new assignment. But as the sun set outside my window, I saw the screen of the computer light up with photos from across the world. There was a waterfall from the hills of Georgia; a pasture in Venus, Texas; budding magnolias in New Jersey. A student in Nome, Alaska, posted a bare cottonwood covered with snow.
An Australian student shared a gum tree blooming after the wildfires there. There were sunrises in California and roadside mushrooms. Snow-filled woods and fruiting lemons. A standoff between a dog and lizard on a bright green lawn.
A southern stingray from the Gulf of Mexico. Fritillaries, songbirds. A Carolina swamp. And the same sky in Ohio and Delaware as out the window of my room.
Of course, access to green space is one of the many inequalities increasingly exposed by this epidemic, and it is possible, in my students’ photos, to see that some, whether because of geography or illness or some other reason, could not go far. In Northern California, we are fortunate to be in the midst of one of the most beautiful springs in recent memory. The streets are quiet, and the air so clear that you can see the mountaintop observatories across the bay. Many people do not have this recourse; later this summer, if the foretold fires come, we may not either.
Over the next few days, the photos continued to flow in, nearly 100, from the Central Valley, Hawaii and Indonesia. There were familiar campus ginkgoes, cedars in Brooklyn, polypore mushrooms climbing a tree in Utah. The assignment was called — because on the spur of the moment I couldn’t think of anything else — “The World Around Us. ” And that was what the students had built.
The deadline was Friday; as I write this, the most recent photo to arrive was of a Muscovy duck swimming in Pastoral Pond Park, Montgomery County, Texas. At the end of the day, this is more than an exercise in finding connection during a time of struggle. As many have noted, the causes and effects of this virus are intimately related to the health of the natural world. Zoonotic diseases like Covid-19 may be linked to increasing deforestation and the sale of wild animals.
Lungs and hearts damaged by atmospheric pollution are more susceptible to severe illness. And the woods and outdoor spaces are providing respite for the millions of people who can no longer go to school or work. It is worth remembering, as this story unfolds, that we are being sustained not only by the neighbors who bring groceries, and the teachers who learn how to manage a classroom of rowdy kindergartners on Zoom, and the doctors and nurses and hospital staff who are risking their lives for a country that can’t, or won’t, supply them with enough protective equipment, but also by the oaks and fritillaries, the gardens and copses of cottonwoods that are so critical to both our physical and mental well-being.
Books of The Times It’s been 20 years since Anthony Bourdain published his best-selling memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” with its solemn warning: Never order fish...
August flew back to Michigan for Thanksgiving. It was his first time on an airplane, and even though he tried to be nonchalant about it, he held his breath duri...
