December 16, 2020
At the start of 1915, as the First World War raged around her, Virginia Woolf proudly declared in a letter to one of her friends that she had nothing to fear from the flu. “[I]nfluenza germs have no power over me,” she wrote to Janet Case, who had recently come down with the flu; if Janet permitted it, Woolf continued, she would be happy to visit her in person. It was a remarkably ill-timed statement, for Woolf would fall sick with influenza repeatedly over the next decade, at times being confined to her bed as long as eight days. Many of the infections also left Woolf in excruciating physical pain, which was only exacerbated by the extreme surgical measures, like tooth extractions, she occasionally took to alleviate the agony. And the discomfort was not temporary; her physician, Dr. Fergusson, worried that the many bouts of influenza in 1916, 1918, 1919, 1922, 1923, and 1925 had done lasting damage to her nervous system and heart.
DVDs possess a certain nostalgia for me. Every week growing up, I would head to the DVD rental shop and rent out exactly two films for Friday and Saturday night as permitted by my parents. Movie watching was a specific, allotted indulgence that I dreamt about all week.
When streaming came along in India and I finally got a Netflix account in the ninth grade, I couldn’t have been happier. Any movie, available at any time? The ease, the convenience, the sheer variety it seemed too good to be true. I didn’t have to comb through lines of shelves or abashedly explain to the cashier that