I said I was going to write one of these each Monday. And then the train of the past two weeks hit. The election. A positive Covid case in my daughter’s classroom. Quarantine, waiting for test results, waiting for election results, watching a coup unfold—when have the internal stakes ever matched the external stakes so well? Or with such absurdity? As an editor I would say: pare back! Too many crises at once! Too many story lines!
And yet here we are. Our poor brains. Our poor tired brains, so desperately in need of rest. (A year of rest and relaxation.)
I’ve had a hard time reading the past two weeks. It’s hard for anything to compare with the page-turning stakes of one’s Twitter feed, or the New York Times. As addictive as doomscrolling along those sites can be, there’s also something transformative & nourishing about being in this time with others. A live and collective processing of shock and astonishment and trauma. It allows me to feel connection and solidarity while locked in my house, masked up, spraying down the bathroom every couple of hours.
But books, too. Here they are, sprinkled all around my house (a problem, really). I’ve picked them up here and there this week, mostly the old ones, the old friends, sweet shoulders to lean on. I crack open Terry Tempest Williams’ brilliant Erosion, her great love song to this time, where she writes, in the preface: “If the world is torn to pieces, I want to see what story I can find in fragmentation.” She ends that preface with the paragraph, “The paradox found in the peace and restlessness of these desert lands, where rockslides, flash floods, and drought are commonplace, allows us to embrace the hardscrabble truths of change. In the process of being broken open, worn down, and reshaped, an uncommon tranquility can follow. Our undoing is also our becoming.”
Our undoing is also our becoming. I’m not yet in that place of “uncommon tranquility,” but I feel its emergence. I feel the hope of this undoing transforming into becoming on global, national and personal planes. We don’t know yet. But if the external mirrors the internal then I can say for sure: we faced those fears. We faced those darkest corners of ourselves. What blooms now?
I also picked up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own because it is what we all want these days, what we all need during the Great Quarantine—that mythological room. But what I found within the pages was something I hadn’t noticed before: the way Woolf was shaped, internally, by the Great War and its accompanying tragedies. “Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?” Before the war becomes a refrain, a time of innocence and romanticism, now lost. Woolf, pondering this cold truth, goes walking. “It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in windowpanes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
One of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. My heart feels torn asunder. For this country. For democracy. For truth. For my Armenian friend and the war that has erupted in her home country. For the many people suffering and dying in rooms alone. For. For. For. When does the for ever end?
And yet this beautiful world, still. These sunsets. These gardens. The music people make. And the words they put down on the page. I feel less alone with all of it. Onward, in fragmentation, dear ones.
xx