Recently I’ve been hearing people — including writers — saying things about the pandemic like “It’s made me reassess what’s really important in life”; “it’s made me take stock of my priorities”; “it’s made me consider how I want to spend the rest of my life”; or, more ominously, “it’s made me feel like there isn’t a future.” Added to the pandemic is social and political upheaval. Added to this is climate catastrophe.
If you really and truly believed you were going to die one day, perhaps one day soon, how would that knowledge affect your priorities? What would you write? What would you read? (Of course, none of us really believe we are going to die . . . ) Postapocalyptic fiction might be one option, to get mentally prepared (and maybe get ideas for prepping). Satire is always popular in periods of decadence and decline. Escapist pulp might keep your mind off things. Maybe you’d turn to writing that broadcasts its sincerity and affective power. Or that claims to dispense wisdom. And the precious, the reflexive, the formalist (and the merely clever) are perennially favorite modes of literature with those with over-active minds who feel the pressure of events pressing in. Personally, writing feels overwhelming, right about now; reading, too, for that matter — though I have to do some of both to prepare for teaching. Teaching is coming up soon, and under present conditions, that’s overwhelming enough by itself. But I can’t escape the feeling that literature, and even formal education, at the moment, is additional — an “added extra” to what most needs doing. “Once I finish my syllabi and get my courses constructed on line, then I’ll start campaigning. Just you wait and see!” But what if it ought to be the other way around? * * * My wife works for a public health agency; back 15 yrs. ago when she started, they did some half-assed trainings about their protocol in case of a pandemic (the experts were warning about it back then). After that, whenever we picked up an extra can or two at the grocery store, or even a purely frivolous snack food, we’d say “for the pandemic” — LOL. Then the current President dismantled the White House pandemic response team — I mean, hey, it cost money, and of all the problems we face, how likely was that, really? Well, guess what? I always buy an extra can or two at the grocery store nowadays — for the pandemic. Which is now. And now we’re playing catch-up. And losing. Something similar is happening with climate change. With a pandemic, economic contraction, racially-motivated police killings, and creeping authoritarianism, who has time to think about climate change? Maybe, as with the virus, climate change will produce a sudden, transformative shock — multiple hurricanes hitting strategic locations at once, a rapid increase in food (or water) prices, an epidemic of insect-borne human, animal, and plant diseases. Then people will have to wake up! If Trump declares martial law, we will rise in our strength! But in the meantime, we’re frogs in the pot, the heat is going up incrementally, and we’re staying put. The water’s fine! * * * “Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. . . . . “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. . . . In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. . . . And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you . . . . You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).” — Milton Mayer’s philologist colleague, in They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945 (orig. pub. 1955).
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |