Philip Christman, author of Midwest Futures, wrote in his newsletter (which Levi Stahl gets the credit for bringing to my attention) about teaching Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, which I first read many years ago.
As Christman notes, this book is all too relevant at the moment, as it “mostly concerns suffering, mass death, and the question of the significance of a single life” and carries a strange blend of nihilism and compassion in the face of it.
So I picked up For the Time Being again. This part got its hooks in me:
“Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? — our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation — now there’s a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.”
Replace “bomb threat” with “coronavirus” or “the election” or “climate change” or “massive economic inequality” or whatever you like. But the part that gets to me is that “slice of life like any other.” This moment doesn’t feel that way, not in the slightest, and yet. Annie Dillard is not wrong.
Here’s what my slice of life is like these days: Working from home, mostly at the table in our office but sometimes on the sofa or in a chair. Even when it gets uncomfortable, feeling too urgent about the work to stop and get comfortable. Working on that. Loving lunch at home every day, even if it’s just a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Having no more and no less time than before. Not taking up new hobbies or discovering myself. Always meaning to go for a walk but rarely doing it. Often meaning to take a bath before bed but rarely doing it. Going to the grocery store exactly once per week. Wearing a mask the last two times, and both times fogging up my glasses.
“Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy — probably a necessary lie — that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?”
I’m trying not to read the news. I avoid thinking too far into the future — just into next week, maybe two weeks from now. Not thinking about when this is supposed to end, how it will end, what it will even mean to end. Living through this does not make us special; this is a challenge humanity has faced many times before. We don’t know what the world will be on the other side, and it’s impossible to know what now will look like from there.