As we lurch ever deeper into the Covid era, through the post-election haze that’s left America’s divisions more entrenched than ever, people all across the political spectrum agree that something is coming. Though we surely don’t agree on what it is, it seems fair to say that very few Americans would dispute that some cataclysm is nearly at hand. Whether it’s the frightening calls for a “Storm” or a “Great Awakening” from the QAnon conspiracy world, or the more sober calls to awaken to the extent of climate catastrophe, economic inequality, racial injustice, political corruption, norm erosion, and technological manipulation growing unchecked around us, we feel as though we’re under a spell that we’re struggling to break free from, hoping to awaken into a newly clarified future, perhaps thereby inaugurating the 2020s in earnest.

At the same time, it feels as though nothing is happening, and might never happen again. Biden’s narrow victory is, at best, a pause in an ongoing narrative of uncertain scope, and thus the clarity we both long for and fear feels still out of reach, so much so that we can hardly even conceive of the question at the heart of our confusion, let alone realistically expect an answer. We’ve become hypersensitized—in a state of exhaustingly high alert—but also deadened, numbed, partly asleep. Scrolling Twitter and bingeing political podcasts, we’re bombarded by a constant churn of dire news, while also sedated by the consistency of the feed, exhausted by our addictive quest for information that we know will never provide the resolution we seek. It’s as if we’ve been dosed with a hallucinogen and, in our desperation to find an antidote, have resorted to taking more of what dosed us.

This feed, which is endless by design, preys on and perverts our hunger for a meaningful narrative that builds toward a satisfying conclusion, promising a coherent dramatic structure that it can never deliver. In this regard, the past four years—if not the entire 21st century so far—have been a swampy, gothic period, haunted by the 20th century’s unresolved conflicts and expectations of what the future was supposed to bring. Given that we are stuck in this shapeless present, the drive to regress (to “Make America Great Again” by returning to an imagined version of the 50s, or the 80s, or, now, to the Obama Era) clashes with the drive to surge forward, either into the End Times or toward a genuinely progressive vision of what a 21st century society, informed by 21st century thinking, could become. Covid functions in the same way, simultaneously looping us back to the influenza pandemic of 1919, our closest referent, and forward, into wild speculation about what a “post-Covid” world might look like (I’ve already heard tell of a “second Roaring Twenties” on the horizon).

Each bombshell news cycle (Trump assassinates Iran’s top general! Trump has Covid! Trump claims he won the election!) is a seed that fails to sprout, a jolt that appears poised to trigger a definitive climax and yet, instead, merely gives way to the next bombshell. It can’t be coincidental that TV, with its endless ups and downs designed only to keep the watcher watching, has eclipsed film, which aspires to bring a single story to a satisfying conclusion in a limited timeframe, as the dominant storytelling mode of the 21st century. I see this as a state of Unworkable Equilibrium (UE), a kind of permanent crisis wherein we’re at once terrified and bored, poisoned by a serialized psychodrama from which we cannot disengage, even while our engagement is driven by distraction (though we never quite know from what).

The Non-era of the Pandemic
After the run of distinct eras that made the first half of 2020 feel like a decade—when the Covid narrative was still fresh enough to appear poised to deliver a revelatory climax—it now feels like we’ve entered the non-era of the pandemic: the beginning of the long haul, even as promising vaccine news offers a glimmer of hope. By this point, Covid has been folded into the ongoing churn of daily life, coopted by a preexisting set of narratives on both the left and the right. Although deaths keep rising, they have lost the ability to override our preconceptions about what they mean. Like gun violence and climate change, Covid has become one more dark thing that, for now, we have no choice but to live with, agreeing (or not) to disagree with one another about how to respond. By the same token, it has also entered pop culture, with the Zoom-set horror movie Host and the upcoming “Covid-23” movie Songbird, not to mention an ever-growing slate of books, documentaries, and a new advertising culture geared toward life in quarantine. Even more significantly, people now report feeling uncomfortable seeing actors without masks in pre-Covid media, as if the pandemic were seeping backward as well as forward in time to become an eternal part of human existence.

The passage of time has thus been warped both by the media environment we were living in before the pandemic, and by the ways in which the pandemic got folded into that environment. While we were medically underprepared for a deadly novel virus, we were, to an even greater degree, narratively over-prepared. All of the conspiracies, cultural fault lines, and brands of motivated reasoning that we’ve seen explode this year, exacerbated by both presidential campaigns, were awaiting deployment long before the virus hit, as if our bodies and minds were equally ready to host what was coming. It has therefore grown impossible to tell if time has sped up or ground to a halt over the course of 2020.

Previous Eras of the Pandemic
I have the sense that much of my thinking has been affected by this temporal fog in ways I don’t yet understand, so it has become important to preserve writing from earlier eras, for archeological reasons. The following notes about last spring and summer in NYC, written in late July, already seem to come from a bygone time, almost a bygone civilization, even though nothing in my life has substantively changed since then:

March: fear, uncertainty; the wound is fresh, seesawing between disbelief (nothing on the Internet is true) and radical belief (everything on the Internet is true). Toilet paper and hand sanitizer are gone. Also, a constant monitoring of perceived symptoms, terror at the slightest cough or catch in the throat, and the sense, upon going to sleep each night, that we might never wake up.

I also felt excitement at the prospect of a concentrated period of solo time, a unique opportunity to fast-track a number of reading and writing projects that might otherwise have taken years to finish, as well as guilt at being in a position where I could have this response to a crisis that I knew was going to ruin the lives of many others. This was the “pandemic is a portal” phase, the hope, among many of my friends, that we might emerge better on the other side.

It was also the beginning of the “men who suddenly have too much free time and love data” genre of Internet article: suddenly, everyone was an expert, hawking charts, graphs, and inside scoops, debating the nature of the “curve” and how/whether to flatten it, arguing over hospitalization rates, R-naught, herd immunity, comorbidities, and ventilators, all terms that most of us were learning for the first time.

Lastly, it was when I started posting a photo of myself with my first cup of coffee each morning, as a kind of proof of life, a tradition I continued to follow until the non-era began sometime in September, at which point the habit lapsed.

April: numbness, sadness, constant sirens, Andrew Cuomo’s daily updates, clapping for the medical workers at 7pm, washing all groceries and leaving dry goods outside the door overnight; washing clothes in the kitchen sink; the peak (or first peak) in NYC. Dawning awareness that this wasn’t going to be a short-term disruption: projections were all over the map, from “six to eighteen months” to “five years, or maybe forever.”
Tiger King.

I started teaching a Zoom workshop on War & Peace. I remember sitting on my roof and cracking the book for the first time, staring up at the pale blue sky, feeling both extreme openness—the sky opening onto infinity—and extreme closedness, as my roof was the only vantage from which I could see it. The vast territory that the sky hung over thus seemed both real and imaginary, just like the vast territory of War & Peace itself, a novel that, I’d soon discover, featured a number of crucial scenes of characters, in states of duress, suddenly seeing the sky and feeling liberated by it.

May: cautious optimism, spring renewal, a hesitant but relief-filled exhale. First walks to Prospect Park, first to-go cocktails, first experience wearing masks, as we hadn’t gone outside before this.

June: protest, a sense of spreading American optimism with a dark undercurrent directed against it, a feeling that this was going to be a feverish, brutal summer, with a totally new focus. Sirens replaced by helicopters. The pandemic wasn’t over, but, for the first time since March, it wasn’t the primary story.

July: quiet, lull. A resurgent low-level horror as the protest narrative subsided and the virus exploded in the South and West. A becalmed, sanctified period of respite in my hometown in MA, a feeling of being far from the world, in an oasis of local safety within a regime of global danger. A desire for the summer to never end, now that its end was creeping into sight and a dark cloud was hovering over the fall.

August through November: back in NYC, the non-era commences. People begin to meet in person again, and to ask one another what they “did during the pandemic,” by which they/we mean the run of months noted above, when the pandemic was still perceptible as a genuine novum, an undigested particle in our collective gut.

Whether the resignation that has inaugurated the non-era is akin to a cure (have we mentally cured ourselves, even as our physical susceptibility worsens?), or the opposite (a mental infection deeper than we can even appreciate), is a question that will only be answerable in the future, if even then. For now, it feels like the virus and the post-election heaviness in the air have merged into a single toxic atmosphere, like a gas leak, making us all woozy as we lurch toward winter.

When this spell breaks, I expect to see things in a new light, and yet I know that this expectation is itself part of the UE, another way in which the struggle to escape the present becomes an endless run around a hamster wheel. What I can’t decide is whether this hamster wheel is extra-durable, a holding environment that has completely encircled us, or the opposite, an eviscerated, disembodied non-space that we’re all about to be ejected from.

It feels like we’re hovering between being right here, wherever that may be, and being nowhere, unable to put our feet down on anything resembling solid ground. We’ve spent ever more time in our own homes and apartments, walking the same few streets and speaking to the same few people rather than meeting anyone new, but have we deepened our relationships with who and where we are, or have we grown more abstracted, losing ourselves in a worldwide crisis that ultimately has nothing specific to do with us?

Are These Historic Times?
As we grapple with these questions, everything that happens seems to sink directly into history, bypassing experience, like a rock sinking through whipped cream, such that the non-era feels both like it’ll never end and like it’s already over.

The other day, I looked up the Wikipedia page for the “George Floyd protests,” to see if one had been compiled yet. Of course, it had. With all the images I remember from the news and my own time marching now arrayed like documents in a textbook, it gave the sense that last summer was already as long ago as the Rodney King riots, or even the Civil Rights Movement. I know that I lived through the George Floyd protests—I remember them—and yet it already feels like it could’ve been decades ago, something I learned about in grade school.

This led me to imagine a new Civil War breaking out due to the disputed election, and myself experiencing this, even while it was going on, as akin to the last Civil War, 160 years ago—both crisis points in American history, the subject of countless volumes of fiction and nonfiction, and both massive events that seemed to have always already happened without ever quite happening.

With this thought experiment in mind, we can pose the question of whether the shock of 2020 has weakened the hold of the UE, or merely served as another mechanism that keeps it in place, just as polarization keeps a certain ruling class in place, defusing the possibility of a true populist uprising on the left or the right, even while seeming to foment it.

Nothing seems more obviously true about this year than to say that it’s been historic, and yet my question remains whether it will prove to be historic in terms of its longterm effects, or if it only feels historic in the moment, because of its myriad, Internet-mediated narratives, and the uncertainty about what, if any, culmination they are approaching. It certainly feels as though an epochal transformation is afoot, but, if it is, why can’t we tell what’s transforming into what? In other words, has historic-ness become a dramatic affect—an Instagram filter that can be applied to any footage—or is it still a genuine perception about reality as it really is?

Whenever a major new event occurs, such as the election and the slew of tragicomic lawsuits seeking to overturn its results, we can watch it turning historical in real-time, being churned through alarming articles, think pieces, official statements, podcasts, memes, parody videos, and so on. The question this leaves me with is whether the process constitutes one of remembering or forgetting, and thus one of parsing the event or of elaborately refusing to parse it. The fact that I can’t tell is of a piece with the fact that none of us yet knows how this era will be remembered, and thus whether we’re living through a blip or a permanent transition, a question that is itself a product of our uncertainty about who we are now, and what we’re becoming.