ON THE TROUBLE WITH REALITY AND THE SIMPLE TRIUMPH OF MAKING IT TO THE END OF ANOTHER WEEK
Wednesday March 18 & Friday March 20 2020
Dear Sarah,
I think that the title of our letters to each other last week — Normalcy & Surreality — could very well be the title-subtitle of many of our upcoming letters!
This week in one of my first layers of mental response to the concept of global pandemic living, I have been grateful that in my home we currently have what we need, and we have a generous amount of space to isolate within. M and I were acknowledging what it would have been like to isolate in the apartment where we stayed when we first moved to Minneapolis — it can’t have been more than 600 square feet, with a bedroom where my office (i.e. desk) was snuggled into the window space, and a living room that flowed into a kitchen-hallway. And we would have been in a building with many other people, many other layers of possible interaction with each other. Here in our home we are the two of us, and we have food and beverages and things to do. My bookshelves are well-stocked with things I haven’t read, we have access to the internet, we have personal projects in progress. We have a bit of money saved and the near-term is all right, I would say. My first impulses were around self-preservation. As things go on, I am wondering what to do next — what are ways I can and should be helping people? What is the role of individuals in a global pandemic, the waves and impacts of which are only beginning to unfold?
It is an interesting time for those of us in the general population — by which I think I mean those of us who are not frontline healthcare workers — for whom the long-term is a bit fuzzy at the moment. What is our world going to look like in the next month, few months, years? Will it look completely different? Will our economy have been, or have to be, retooled and reshaped for a new reality? I think I am echoing myself from my letter of last week, but so little time has passed in which so much seems to be changing — it boggles the mind.
+ + +
It’s Friday now. Last night I was thinking about my letter to you. Thursday was a gloomy day in all kinds of ways. The weather was gloomy. I felt tired. You and I were texting (which did not make me feel gloomy!) about how we’re doing, how things are going, and I said that it feels different to think about a pandemic than it does to be living in one. The anxiety of what could be had given way to the action-oriented pose of what is currently going on. I thought I was handling it well — I suppose I still am handling it well, for the time being — but I realized that earlier in the week I was running on novelty and adrenaline, feeling reassured that we had toilet paper and pantry staples and snacks and alcohol to get us through a stretch of time, and helping my parents as well as I could from a distance, making sure they had food and supplies and some extra funds at hand. Yesterday I just felt sad about it all, felt sad that the world is different, and that from the view of a virus we are just specks or hosts or the like. We still matter as people to each other, but cosmically we will come and go, we are specks on the earth.
Had I written my letter to you in full last night it may have been a bit darker or sadder. Today I still feel those emotions but in a different way. The sun is out this morning, and it is Friday, which now feels less like the end of a work week and more like a simple triumph: we made it to the end of another week.
I’ve been thinking about all the teachers (perhaps primarily college-level instructors, though it must apply variously to teachers of students of all ages) who are supposed to promptly convert their lessons and teaching and work into an online-only format. I wonder how it is working. I have been thinking about this piece in Hyperallergic about the teaching of art online under the COVID-19 pandemic. In all facets of our lives we are seeing the first waves of the immediate response to the moment — how do we keep doing the things we were doing, in a new format that will let us keep going as we were? We were having classes, we’ll keep having classes. People are working toward degrees, they’ll keep working toward degrees. This feels like an appropriate response to a situation in which we think things will return to where they were before the pandemic. But I wonder how things will be uprooted, reshaped in the longer term. Will things look the same on the other side? Will we go back to having the same kinds of jobs? Even if this pandemic comes to a close, and a vaccine is eventually developed, and we treat this disease in our lives more or less like the flu — i.e. manageable, familiar in a societal sense — will there be another pandemic, of a different or similar sort? Maybe we will become excellent at anticipating and handling pandemics. But will the way we live and move among ourselves, the way we form businesses and larger communities that rely on human and social interaction in shared spaces, will those foundations shift toward something different? Maybe there will be a longer arc of a shift toward something as yet unknown. To loop back on teaching — I’m curious if all the things that are continuing to be taught in the immediate moment, the continuation of plans we had that we’ll all execute on in order to keep things moving while we wait to see what happens — I’m curious if everything continues to be as relevant as it was, or seemed, even a few weeks ago. What will change in the short-term, what will change for good, for the long-term? (Thinking now about how we use the phrase for good to mean something ultimate, a change made for good as an endpoint, but is an endpoint change necessarily a change that is good? For good?)
I’ve been thinking on your letter from last week and your friend’s description of the situation as a slow-motion 9/11. It was particularly on my mind as I’ve been continuing to listen to the classical station this week — M is working from home and the radio has been on more during the day, playing in the background — and the tone of the music has been what I think is intended to feel peaceful or soothing but strikes me as melancholy, an extended lament. I was thinking about how when 9/11 happened I was in school at the University of Michigan and they held a memorial concert at Hill Auditorium, and the orchestra played Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and we were all feeling the immediacy of the loss and the mourning, and we marked it with that concert even as the effects of the day would ripple on and out into the many years since. Now we’re in an extended period of melancholy, without an anchor of what to mark, because the thing is still rolling through, even as many hundreds of people have died already from the swift movement of the virus. I’m glad and grateful to be feeling healthy, to feel like I have what I need, and that M and I are together in this. And I’m also sad not to go to the public spaces that are a regular part of our daily lives — bookstores and coffee shops and museums, places where we can be with others, sometimes together-together, sometimes alone together.
You and I are not that often together-together, but we are together in spirit and here in our letters. I hope you are faring all right and that you and your family are feeling well and braving this strange reality as best as you can! I’m very curious to hear how it is all going for you. M and I enjoyed delicious creamed spinach with dinner last night and I thought of my stay at your place this winter, in the time of travel and visits with friends, that time of Doing Things out in the world. I hope to see you again sooner, friend! Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
March 20, 2020
Dear Eva,
Whoa. I feel almost speechless at the end of this week, which felt more like a month. It is especially hard to gather up coherent thoughts to sum it up because my experience over the course of the days has been so inconsistent—some very dark, bleak hours, some truly lovely ones. We have been essentially homebound since last Saturday, leaving only for groceries, walks, and one mortgage refinancing closing today that involved one of us sitting in the car with the kids while the other scurried into a room in a closed bank that wreaked of bleach to sign a stack of documents with a pen we brought from home. Oh, and one highlight, which was meeting my parents and my sister and three of her kids in my parents’ backyard for an hour on a sunny, warm-enough day earlier this week. It was delightful, except when we arrived and Simon ran up to his college-age cousin and threw his arms around her legs and then burst into tears when I yelled, “No hugging!” It turns out the almost-4 year old has a little bit of a hard time grokking the concept of social distancing with a cousin he hasn’t seen in weeks. Huh.
I continue to experience what feel like flip-flopping realities from one day or even hour to the next, in addition to the standard alternate reality I occupy compared to many fellow citizens. It has me revisiting a petite little book I read shortly after the 2016 election, The Trouble with Reality, by my favorite human among humans I have never met, Brooke Gladstone.
“Part of the problem stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.”
Is this another way of recognizing and framing something we have talked about in prior letters, about how much power a context holds to shape the meaning of whatever it is you’re viewing within it? Even an entire human reality? This feels so profoundly true, but at the same time, dizzying.
It is odd to look at our lives a little objectively right now as we live through a global pandemic. There are days that feel normal, cozy even. Should they? Tonight Bill made homemade pizza for Movie Night, and we watched the movie Big. The boys really enjoyed it, but they were perplexed by the scene where Tom Hanks touches Elizabeth’s Perkins’ breast. Actual quote: “Maybe touching another person’s breast was a fashion back in the old days.” It was one of those moments of viridity that almost physically hurt. God, I want nothing more than to keep these kids safe and their lives as happy and good as they are right now.
I keep periodically losing my grip on my commitment to take it one day at a time. Trying to remain clear-eyed and informed without drifting into despair is taking more of a regimen than it usually does. No news after 9 PM, limited media consumption throughout the day, far more messages, video chats, and phone calls with loved ones than normal. It has been interesting to watch and participate in what feels like a reinvention of so many things in life. Will people ever think of work in the same way? Will we continue to use technology as an actual tool for connection and meaningful gathering? Will we ever again forget why we need a government? Will we forget that reality is personal and ever-changing?
This letter is feeling a bit disjointed and perhaps even mildly incoherent, but it’s the middle of a goddamn pandemic, and it’s Friday night after a week in our house working full time and trying to home school our two young ones and I have no idea what tomorrow will bring. In other words, I am cutting myself some slack and ending this letter without giving it another read or trying to bring it all together. I do want to say that I very much miss you, and I am hoping we can find a time for a nice juicy long phone call next week. I could not find a good chunk of time for that this week as we adjusted to our new normal, and I am the worse for it. We must find a way to make it happen next week. I miss my friend!
Until then,
Your friend,
Sarah