Coronavirus: US man Daniel Thorson emerges from 75-day isolation

A man has surfaced after a 75-day silent retreat deep in the US woods to the reality of a coronavirus nightmare.

US man Daniel Thorson. Picture: Twitter

After a 75-day silent retreat in a cabin in Vermont, Daniel Thorson emerged into the world once more.

“I’m back,” he informed his followers on Twitter. “Did I miss anything?”

He was aware of the new coronavirus when he went into isolation in early March. A visitor from Boston, who stayed at the centre before restrictions were imposed, appears to have infected several people there. Mr Thorson developed symptoms while in his cabin, but they were very mild. “I calibrated how bad [the pandemic] would be from my own experience,” he said.

I'm back from 75 days in silence. Did I miss anything?

— Daniel Thorson (@dthorson) May 23, 2020

Off into silent retreat (aka voluntary physical and memetic self-quarantine) for the next 75 days or so.

And, if you're curious about why I would do such a thing, I've just released a podcast with my teacher Soryu Forall.

May you be happy and safe. ❤️https://t.co/amcRXyvshz

— Daniel Thorson (@dthorson) March 13, 2020

He expected to see some updates on that. Instead, the news he read on his phone was strange, confusing and entirely about a single topic, and he wasn’t sure how far to trust it.

“I’m always sceptical of how closely what the internet presents coheres with reality,” he said yesterday (Wednesday).

On his first trip out, he saw a family in shirts and shorts getting out of their car at a petrol station. They were not wearing masks. “I think I was reasonably reassured by that image,” he said. But then he stepped into a supermarket, glad to be around people once more and was amazed by “the anxiety I felt radiating off a lot of folks”.

Mr Thorson, 33, works at the Monastic Academy, a “centre for mindful learning” in the mountains of Vermont. It has cabins where visitors can perform short retreats, but its staff are able to withdraw for longer, picking up food each day from the kitchen.

“You don’t interact with anybody,” he said. “We say you are to be treated like a ghost.”

He could see new rules had been implemented in the kitchen, and that staff were now wearing masks, but “I had no sense of what that really meant,” he said. “A pandemic has never happened in my lifetime.”

He emerged like Rip Van Winkle, the villager who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains in Washington Irving’s story and wakes 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution.

Mr Thorson said he was amazed by Boris Johnson’s story, “how he was one of the most sceptical (people) about Covid, then he got it and almost died, and how kind of human that story is”.

The Times