Hindsight is 2020
I have started to learn that, almost without fail, the more dismal a period is, the more likely you are to look back at it as in fact a great adventure, or the start of one. This is the most I can hope to say (or say to hope) concerning 2020.
As I enter the final month of an interminable year, I recognize that personally, 2020 has had its share of blessings, mostly undeserved, and difficulties, mostly chosen. I left one of those sudden, strange romances with a place in the jolting confusion of the pandemic. Only one of my final few nights in San Francisco did I know it was the last, and that is a queer pain. I compared the parting to a canceled summer camp stricken by illness among the campers, and in hindsight it has that childhood’s nostalgia of not understanding the adult reason that ended things and thinking we could have muddled through. I exited on friendly terms from a rewarding job in unsure times for a book contract whose greatest comfort was that it involved a story quite familiar to me, a decision which had some romantic elements of foolishness and which even now seems definitively right only in the midst of writing the damn thing. I traded sultry Californian valley heat for humid Virginian summer and then sudden snowless winter, which to me felt like a strange homecoming. San Franciscan weather never felt quite like home, except at night; it always seemed heavenly, too good to be true, and that you were not good enough to deserve it — never that Midwestern air which allows you to exist in a comfortable, Protestant state of forgiveness. San Francisco Bay is too beautiful; I both envy those who live there full time while fearing for their sanity amidst such beauty. If you look too closely into the green mountains, the perfect waters, you develop a sort of mania. It is the only way to explain hippies.
All this amidst a pandemic which has made for a deadly time for some, a lamentable time for all (except Jeff Bezos). It is apt that a pandemic which has homebound so many brought me closer to home after wandering around the world, but I am content with the poetic twist. I left the Ohio and its Appalachian foothills for California during a personal pandemic of the soul, so to speak; to come back to it with a clean and light heart while the world suffers seems an odd selfishness, but that is how things go. Still, I think back to that old dark spell, often, in the midst of this one, and the bright sun which waited beyond it. I am the least likely to be bullish on humanity or America’s future (politicians conflate the two), but there is something in the species which makes bad times inevitably lead to better selves. If you are a stoic, this is as good as good times.
As for America, I am not sure of her fully restored glory, at least to old heights. The book I am working on partially concerns those old heights and, though it may be bias, I am convinced she will never quite return to the highwater mark of patriotic post-war confidence and newborn globalist innocence. Ecclesiastes warns against inquiring why the old days were better, but I do not read this as a condemnation of nostalgia — rather, of wishing to have a particular greatness again in a time when that greatness is not intended. Perhaps there are other great ages, perhaps there are other ages in which to be great. We have, all of us, gained a great deal this year and lost a great deal, too; it is up to us to decide what is best done with the new set of materials. I have been given a new belief in writing, more potent and mad than the last; I have been given a book and a gang of writers who do not think me mad for wanting to write it; I have been given a cat named after a titan of the English-speaking peoples; I have been given a grand romance, the likes of which I did not allow myself to believe in earlier periods of my life. In this light, 2020 was a grand success, and I cannot forget it.
Before March, I think we could safely rest our hopes in larger institutions, at least in the short term; now, hopes must be vested more quietly, in ourselves and families, churches and towns, counties and states, before we can build back to that hopefulness of a budding nation, vaulting into the future. Perhaps it will be another nation, entirely. Larger institutions are merely the collective inertia of private hopes and wills, and I think many of us face the raw and primitive work of having to start over again, within.
And I’d wager there’s something rather magical about that.
