At the Downing Street Press Conference yesterday, an unfamiliar government minister announced that, in the previous 24 hours, a further 260 people in the UK had died from Coronavirus. This has taken the death toll as a result of this infection to 1,019. Inevitably, it is at this macro level that the state has to operate. Public health is always about numbers, percentages, projections, models, best guesses, and, when resources are limited (as they inevitably are, for government is ever the art of the possible), least worst options. 

Yet it is personal. Our always slightly dishevelled Prime Minister has tested positive for the virus and he no longer stands at the podium. He is self-isolating with his pregnant fiancée. Apparently displaying only mild symptoms, Boris is, we are told, still very much in charge, but every day we see a different face.
 
Still, how inadequate statistics are in the face of just one life. There is a saying in the Talmud, the Mediaeval commentary on the Hebrew Bible, which is itself regarded as a sacred text, “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because in the movie, Schindler's List, it was quoted as, "He who saves the life of one man saves the entire world."
 
And so, it was for this reason that I stood with my family at the open door of our home a couple of nights ago and applauded the men and women working in our National Health Service – especially those on the vulnerable edge of the front line of this very real battle against an invisible foe. I have friends who are NHS doctors and right now they are exhausted and anxious, stretched to the limit. Most of us are still shielded from the real potential for harm that Covid-19 can inflict on a person – particularly one whose immune system is fragile, or whose heart is weak, or lungs damaged. We have merely been inconvenienced. Yesterday I was 7thin line to enter the Spar, but I could still purchase milk and bread, bananas, broccoli, and biscuits; they had no bagels, but they have no bagels at the best of times. We stood in line up the street, 2 metres apart in the cold wind and the spring sunshine. Everyone smiled and chatted amiably as we waited. No one was in a hurry. We had time to talk. A slim athletic woman in her 70s, dressed in red lycra and wheeling a bike, arrived with her similarly attired husband. She commented to me wryly, “at least the Luftwaffe aren’t bombing us in our beds.”
 
My father was a schoolboy at the start of the 2nd World War, in a boarding school on the English south coast. In the summer of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, he and his classmates used to watch dogfights from the clifftops as Spitfires and Messerschmitts strafed one another over the waves. The clash of nations wasn’t real to them, they didn’t encounter death or pain; the war was a spectacle full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – at worst an inconvenience. And so it is, until someone you know and love doesn’t come home.  
 
On Friday Bob Dylan, now approaching his 80th birthday, unexpectedly released his first original song since 2012. Murder Most Foul is a 17-minute meditation on death. An apocalyptic American Pie, without chorus or hook, it opens with the assassination of John F Kennedy only to become an overview of half a century of cultural change and decay. Guardian columnist Alexis Petridis asks, “Is the litany of music, film and literature that consumes the song’s second half intended to suggest its author thinks art is a meaningless distraction at moments of tragedy, or vitally important?” He concludes, “‘Hush little children, you’ll understand / the Beatles are coming, they want to hold your hand’ implies the former, although the very timing of Murder Most Foul’s release suggests it’s the latter.”
 
The reality is, that in the face of death, we need art more than ever. In his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, wrote, “The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
 
When my daughter was desperately sick in 2012, it was one line from Leonard Cohen’s song, Come Healing,that sustained me: “None of us deserving the cruelty or the grace.” I needed more than kindness to ease my anguish; kindness can be too intrusive. I needed a song. I needed words. I needed art. I needed to know that someone else knew how this pain felt. Just before my mother died that same year, it was in words that I found grace. I read to her a poem attributed to that ancient middle eastern shepherd, poet, prophet, and military leader, whom we remember as David, king of Israel:
 
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For you are with me.
 
Mum had severe dementia and had ceased to speak, eat, or drink. She had hours to live. I have no idea if she heard me, but in that moment it was the art of the poet that saved me.
 
Statistics can never do that.

Chris Denne