Monday, December 13, 2021
I’m
a bit late getting to this year's edition of Best American Essays. When the series started it was what I read
on the bus to wherever we were having Thanksgiving that year. The
experiences and thoughts of the essayists about 2020 are a strange
feeling reminder of a year that somehow seems a blank, even though it
featured national civil rights protests, a global pandemic, a near
coup….
Looking back over the entries I made here at Outside Counsel for 2020 I am struck by how little I wrote, and by my nearly complete failure to document the peculiar sense of alienation that was the defining emotional state of the pandemic. In the early going I re-read The Plague, and thought it had a worthwhile message: do your work. The isolation that many experienced was, perhaps less profound for me than for many others because I was going into my office to work. On the other hand a lot of the interpersonal interaction that I did experience was characterized by anger and frustration. The most notable example was the screaming argument with one of the principals of the Body Bar, a sort of gym in my building, over masking, but the anger I experienced whenever I saw someone unmasked at the supermarket or somewhere, and even the slightly milder sense of irritation I experienced whenever I saw someone with a mask that didn't cover their nose was near constant.
And, of course, there was the November into December 2019 spent attending to my parents as my father recovered from his broken hip. Because his injury occurred before full lockdown he was able to spend the time needed in the hospital, which was fortunate, but we were still in a sort of twilight time which required Covid testing, and Covid caution. We didn't really know how the virus spread at that point, and everyone's hands were chapped from constant applications of disinfectant. I was in North Carolina then, and the post-election crazy was building, but I could have never imagined how crazy it was going to get.
// posted by Bill @ 9:54 AM 
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Funny, I re-read The Plague, too, but also Station Eleven, which is more apocalyptic, but also focused more on the virus-long-gone aftermath. Still, perhaps a similar message, ultimately.
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