![]() Or at least with upheavals far enough removed so as to allow me to feel physically and mentally insulated. For me, they are a cross product of my intersecting privileges: born in the United States, to professional parents, at a point in history where my life has proceeded, for the most part, through a series of economic booms without major socio- or geopolitical upheavals. It will take some time to let go of the long-held, seldom-questioned assumptions of everyday life: that tomorrow will look like yesterday, next year like the last. Even as our stark new reality becomes clear, it remains hard to accept that “normal” was the fiction. The stronger bubble, the one that persists, is the psychological one. What I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that this supposed technological bubble was just that: a thin layer that popped easily. That, despite what we know from the historical and geological and biological record, human civilization-thanks to advancements in science and medicine and social and governmental structures-exists inside a bubble, protected from the kind of cataclysmic event we are currently experiencing. That life on Earth is generally stable, not precarious. The grand, shared illusion that we are separate from nature. What the current crisis and our responses to it, both individual and institutional, have reminded us of is not the unreality of the pandemic, but the illusions shattered by it: That we have departed from it into strange territory.īut what if it’s exactly the other way around? ![]() What does it mean to say that this doesn’t feel real? The feeling seems to derive from the assumption that life before the pandemic, “normal” life, was real. The case count and death toll grow with each refresh of the page.Īnd yet some part of me still doesn’t want to accept that these calamities are really happening. More than 16 million people in the United States applied for unemployment over just three weeks. Stock-market convulsions have destroyed, in a matter of days, nest eggs built over decades. Of course, the global catastrophe unfolding is nothing but real. Unreal, or its variations: not real, surreal, this can’t be real. Mostly, I hear it from my own mouth, because I haven’t left the house in a month, but also I hear it from friends on Zoom or Skype, and from the news on TV or online. One word I’ve been hearing a lot lately is unreal. ![]() I got about midway through page 3 and stopped. In the air is a growing feeling of incipient chaos. ![]() The protagonist, who works in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise, takes the elevator down to the lobby and walks out onto the street to find the world on pause, its social rhythms and commercial activity suspended. Not time itself, just the convention of time. Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |