Mask hides face, but reveals compassion

When you put on a mask, you “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” said that friendless sad sack always saying the wrong thing in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Our masks send out a signal that our facial expressions no longer can. What are they saying? “I care about your health and mine,” most likely.

A face mask is fast and easy. Women and some men once prepared their faces with makeup, but these days it rubs off on the fabric. That no one can see you anyway is the bright side of breathing safely behind your mask.

It’s also the dark side. Lonely people in masks, especially in unfriendly cities like Toronto, are more cut off from human contact than ever. As the British essayist Olivia Laing wrote about falling into painful solitude in New York City, “my life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed at its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing.” A stained mask?

The experience was like being a woman in a Hopper painting, she wrote in “The Lonely City,” a fascinating wrenching book.

During the pandemic, people with unmasked faces test the patience of the masked. Is there nothing that pleases us? Not right now, no. We have gone from thinking that a jogger or cyclist is too close to muttering “They should wear a mask” as they pass. That’s Canada, though. In America, they just shoot you.

Donald Trump is increasingly surrounded by masked toadies at his public events, but he keeps his own silly orange face naked. Unaware of already being a global laughingstock, he fears being laughed at. The effect is to make him look freakish and out of place, a possible chocolate fountain of viral load, a puffy-haired emblem of the pandemic.

If angry Americans accuse mask-wearers of virtue-signalling, it follows that barefaced people — this includes the baseball-capped man who broke a security guard’s arm in a Los Angeles Target for asking him to mask up — are “vicesignalling.”

In Canada, anyone not wearing some kind of mask is increasingly regarded as pretty much a jerk, especially in stores. I did my first one-woman Loblaws shop (heavily masked) in a decade and it was a revelation. The shoppers who inform you that you’re walking the wrong way down the cereal aisle are invariably sans mask.

They haven’t thought this through. If you’re barefaced in the vegetable section, don’t talk loudly on your phone. Keep a low profile. Remain silent and drift past the mixed nuts and chocolate fingers like a wisp, a ghost.

But they are angry people convinced the world is against them (it is). Or they’re the nicest people in the big room: Instacart shoppers.

Despite U.S. data showing that American men are less likely than women to wear masks even though COVID-19 hits men more than women — they think masks make them look weak — Canadian Instacart is different.

A female Instacart shopper explained it to me, laughing. The shoppers are almost all 30ish men who have never before shopped for food, the women in their family having done it for them.

They are hopeless, she told me. She has to help them find things and they cluster, bent over phones as they text their clients asking for guidance, as if you were a hotel concierge.

They are the nicest guys I’ve ever met. All I know is that they’re bad at their job, cheerfully select the most stale, pale broccoli they can find, and blossom when you praise them at the door (Canadians don’t do praise). You raise their tip and give them five stars on the app, a new social ritual called basic pandemic courtesy.

It’s not clear why stores don’t insist they wear masks, now as valued a commodity as Lysol wipes and yeast. There are so very many masks now. My Miele vacuum cleaner filter mask was excellent but stifling. The blue disposables I made out of shop towels, florist wire and elastic bands are just tissue balloons.

There are statement masks. A Peach Berserk mask says “I am interesting underneath.” Male cyclists’ black masks say the same thing as their Lycra bums raised high over their X-Ray racing bikes, “I am winning the Tour de France.”

I do dislike the masks, essential as they are. “There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect,” Laing wrote pre-COVID. I didn’t think she was right about this but now I wonder. With masks, you can no longer spot your people, your kindred souls, your type.

All we have to go on is that people who wear masks are smart and thoughtful. People who don’t wear masks are going to be wearing masks very soon, bulldozed by corporate and government forces into intelligence and compassion.

Lonely people in masks, especially in unfriendly cities like Toronto, are more cut off from human contact than ever