I haven't even got a proper title for this: a pandemic year(ish) in review(ish), 12+ months on
Just over a year ago, I started off my ‘Is there a ’best age’ to be in today’s world? How scary, really, does the future have to be?’ post with this quotation:
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” (EB White)
I haven’t had to resort to recycling old quotations because I’m short of ideas; rather, I want to stress how relevant that thought is right now.
There are a lot of ideas on my mind that I’d like to share. But I can’t seem – despite what I’ve attempted to say before – to overcome this need to find ‘ideal conditions’ in which to write.
‘Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in the human situation.’ (Ways of Escape, Graham Greene)
There, that’s better.
Rewind back to March 2020 with me if you will – sorry, this brings back painful memories to the start of the pandemic. Maybe we oughtn’t to turn back the clock, even for a minute.
But I will anyway, for comparison’s sake.
March 2020: suddenly many of us are working from home (WFH) for the first time. Adjusting on the fly. Fumbling through the murk. Figuring things out as we go along. Diving in at the deep end. Sink or swim?
The challenges that lay ahead? We had little to no idea.
But as I wrote about at the time, and into April, May and the rest of 2020, I, along with so many others, was hit with waves of nostalgia. We all, it seemed, starting reaching out to friends, both old and new. Suddenly, we felt the need to have weekend Zoom chats with long-lost friends – never mind all the time during the week we were spending sat at our computers on Zoom. Never mind all the times pre-pandemic when we didn’t feel the need to have group chats.
And in those heady early days I was busily typing away, writing, pondering, reflecting, sharing.
It was back in March 2020 that I started sharing loads of links to articles. I’d carefully select the best of what I’d read that week/month and add some half-assed acerbic commentary to go along with them, with barely any idea on whether my loyal readers clicked on any of them (yes, I did hear from some who said ‘thanks’ on occasion).
By mid-May 2020, I had written 8 posts and would go on to write 24 in total in 2021, with 10 in August alone. Productivity!
Here we are mid-May 2021 and this is post 5. Okay, so not that far off last year’s output, but the difference is this: last year I was bubbling with energy and the inclination to write. And now: it almost feels me with dread (and yet, and yet – I persist; it’s good for me, I hope).
Now, I feel so few pangs of nostalgia. No more maudlin evenings listening to the songs I used to console myself over after teenage heartbreak. It’s a battle to write at all. I use my computer for work and after that, I can hardly bring myself to use it, to look at the screen, never mind write to people. I’ve neglected friends (sorry). I’m getting by on the bare minimum of sleep.
In February, I wrote about how ‘No one cares about your problems.’ That might have got a bit misinterpreted by some, maybe. I didn’t mean that no one, truly, cares – of course people do, your dearest friends, your family (hopefully), and ultimately, there are people whose job it is to care. I meant more like, in a superficial way, we’re all dealing with various WFH issues, and mental health issues, and stress, anxiety, backaches, headaches, what-have-you.
But…at the end of the day, you have to get your shit done. Somehow. And we did, we have, we continue to do so, and life slowly proceeds in, we all hope, the right direction. We’re getting there, but we’ve had to get through the Zoom fatigue/anxiety and various other ailments.
Some reading:
(New York Times)
(The Atlantic)
and
(The Economist)
And from this one I quote:
‘This employee restlessness seems to relate to the sheer length of the lockdown. The novelty has worn off and working from home seems much less appealing... And the time spent on screen has led to a feeling of fatigue.
It has also led to increased stress. A study of 1,500 workers in 46 countries by the Harvard Business Review found that 85% said their well-being had declined and 55% felt they had not been able to balance their work and home lives.
The problems are physical as well as mental. A survey of Italian workers found that 50% reported greater neck pain, and 38% increased lower-back pain, while working remotely. This is probably because home furniture is not designed to accommodate extensive computer use.’
And so it goes.
I want to write less about this stuff, and that’s the ‘plan’ going forward.
(But as loyal readers might want to point out, as they jump and down in their seats right now, jeering and shouting at their screens: you liar, you! You promise this and that all the time! Enough of the overpromises!)
(Noted.)
(And another area to avoid: endless pontificating about myriad things on my mind, blabbering about most of my usual trite tropes. But I’m not promising anything.)
Armchair escapism: travelling via books
I suppose travelling is an option, depending on where you live, but why leave the comforts of your home when instead you can lose yourself in the vicarious adventures of others? Why bother with all that hassle and uncertainty when you can safely stow away on some epic peregrinations to all sorts of distant and exotic locales?
Rewind to the early days of the pandemic and like others, I was missing a bit of the social element. Zoom teaching was – and is – fun, but there’s nothing that can quite replicate live, face-to-face interaction.
But I’m an introvert at heart and at this stage, I crave nothing more than solitude and a chance to escape somewhere in the wilds of the great outdoors to walk and think and get as far away from civilization as possible.
‘One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.’ (On Going a Journey, William Hazlitt)
My primary travelling companion over the past few months has been Nick Hunt, author of Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn. Paddy Leigh Fermor has been a regular ‘visitor’ to these pages over the years, but for those who might have missed his story: in December 1933, at the age of 18, Paddy set off from England and ended up walking all the way to Constantinople, arriving on New Year’s Day, 1935. He wrote about his journey in three parts, many years later: A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986); The Broken Road (posthumous, 2013).
Nick Hunt recreated the journey in 2011 and he more than did justice to Paddy’s exquisite prose – I can’t recommend highly enough diving into Paddy Leigh and then Hunt – or maybe even vice versa, which could be enlightening.
A few years ago, inspired by Paddy Leigh, I was sorely tempted to book myself a cheap one-way flight to somewhere in Europe on a whim and just walk and walk for as long as I could – until my money ran out, my legs got too sore, or my wife demanded my return.
And now, how I sorely long to go on an epic walking sojourn of my own, either in Paddy’s and Nick’s footsteps, or on my own solitary journey.
‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.’ (Henry David Thoreau)
What else I’ve been reading
Just a handful of 2021 reading highlights thus far:
Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane (escapism in the mountains)
The Italians, John Hooper
How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton
Americana: A Brief History of American Capitalism, Bhu Srinivasan
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott
A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton
Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith
Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryann Wolf
Two failed re-reading attempts:
Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, Carlo Emilio Gadda
Re-reading for the umpteenth time, and it’s always a glorious metaphysical treat:
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
Skip it:
On the Road, Jack Kerouac (did I miss something? Christ, this was turgid…)
The two best books I’ve read:
The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel (I can’t stop recommending this book)
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, José Saramago (my first Saramago book and I can hardly wait to read more)
And lastly, the best thing I’ve read online, from Oliver Burkeman, one of my favourite writers. Here he tackles free will (spoiler alert: there’s no such thing as free will):
(The Guardian)
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