The other night my friend Margot called. It’s not unusual for me to hear from Margot — we’ve been friends for more than 30 years, email frequently, have dinner every month or two, and I stay over at her house whenever I’m in town. But Margot never calls. Practically no one does; my few surviving telephonic friendships antedate the internet. But Margot has a cold, and because her husband is immunocompromised, she’d had to quarantine herself in their guest room; she was, in effect, the invalid mother confined to her room upstairs in some Victorian novel. She’d been just about to email me when she thought, why would I email? and picked up the phone.

Once I’d ascertained that it wasn’t an emergency, her call was a pleasant surprise. We talked for half an hour or so, and it cheered us both in a dark, uncertain time.

Inspired by our conversation, I started surprising other people, in these first few days of quarantine, by calling them up just to chat. They, too, seemed pleasantly surprised. We’d talk for a half-hour, 45 minutes, an hour or more — about what a weird, unprecedented time it is, how disastrous to have no one competent in charge in the crisis, how much food we have, what the local stores are like, how seriously we’re taking the restrictions on our movements, how it affects our relationships (do you hastily break up rather than be trapped for months with the wrong person? Is a pandemic a good excuse to reconcile with an ex?). We made jokes about it and laughed together from opposite coasts, like kids cracking up at a funeral.

If, like me, you’re unlucky enough to be quarantined alone (or, even less luckily than me, quarantined with the wrong person), before long you’re going to find yourself starved for some human interaction, even if you think of yourself as an introvert. In one sense, we’ve never been better equipped to endure long periods of social isolation, since we’re all pretty much shut-ins now anyway and are more connected to the “outside world” (meaning one another) than ever before. But we’re still going to have to get inventive about ways to approximate human contact in the weeks and months to come. This may include innovations like movie simulcasts and virtual happy hours, but also a revival of the good old telephone. There is no substitute for touch, sadly, but the warm timbre of a human voice in your ear is more real, more present, than text on a screen. (AT&T’s old slogan was “Reach out and touch someone.”) When you hang up after a phone call, you feel some of the residual glow of having been with another human being.