If there is a better word for our 2020 zeitgeist, well, I am too tired to think of it. As we creep toward December 31, fatigue has spread across the land. Like a plague miasma in a Gothic novel, it leaves each of us fevered and unwilling to face the hard work of our daily lives, much less the world at large. We do not have enough weak and trembling fingers to point at all of the demons in the mist, even to identify the one who is reflected back to us in the mirror.
Our day-to-day existence seems depressed by the larger circumstances of this crisis year. Friends facing health concerns wait crucial months for treatments. Family evacuate the comfort of their homes from impending hurricanes or wildfires, and still look forward to a long and difficult recovery. Elderly relatives don’t get visited for fear of contamination or because vague distant bureaucrats have issued unclear, sometimes unfounded parameters (Is it better at an advanced age to die cloistered and alone or from a disease contracted while sitting with and holding the hand of a family member?). These frequent short circuits to everyday living — overlayed by the impending elections, imploding civic life, economic uncertainties, and shortages of the small necessities of average life — fatigue our waking moments.
This year even more than usual, the farm has been a refuge. I have had more time for projects, gardens, interactions with my partner, and all the things that have made this life, frankly, pretty special. Even so, at times it seems as if the blue sky is the eye of the storm. I get out and get the work done, I sit on the porch and enjoy the birdsong, but only before the next wave of bad news hits and leaves debris in its wake.
Such as it is for our race and always has been: brief blue skies before war, pestilence, and hunger sweep back across the land. Yet, we moderns have by and large lived our lives sheltered from the worst. And it has made us soft. We complain about the hangnail, not imagining that a cancer awaits us all. Our fatigue arises from our failure to recognize that history is not only a cycle but also a hurricane. A moment of seeming separation from history does not provide immunity from its winds. Ours is the delusion of the moviegoer, that the dynamics outside have been suspended while we sit in a cushy chair, entertained, in the darkness.
I am not afraid. But it is disconcerting to speculate that the blue sky we have lived under for most of our lives will be going away. History has proven it so.
Farming, for me, has been the practical vaccine for what ails. My optimism is tempered by the expected catastrophe. Out of that mix comes whatever happens. Better to stand, no matter how fatigued, and meet it with resolve, even if it destroys what we have loved.
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Reading this weekend: Local Culture: a journal of the Front Porch Republic (The Christopher Lasch issue).
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BTW: Brutus, fellow blogger, at The Spiral Staircase, paid us a farm visit. That in turn inspired his next post, broadly about dogs and always about more than the main topic. https://brutus.wordpress.com/2020/10/15/a-dogs-life/
Brian,
Your essay really hits home. In spite of 2020 being the best cropping year on our farm, in over 40, I find myself in a strange sort of funk about the future. Maybe “angst” is the more appropriate term.
My only surviving uncle just turned 101 two weeks ago. He is depressed as he is in an assisted living center and is practically a prisoner in his room. No communal dining, or even visiting from residents or relatives is allowed. We can speak through his screened window now, but what about winter. Sometimes I feel we are living in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Don
Don,
Thanks. Similarly, this has been one of the best years in meat sales on our farm. But that hasn’t encouraged me. And I have been wondering the same about my Aunt (now 100), how to visit her during the winter. We have been visiting through an open window. Of course, the Tennessee winter is not that of the Wisconsin sort. Still, it won’t be easy or even possible on many days.
My best,
Brian
Thank you. I just said as much to someone an hour before I read this.
And asked her to never ever turn the current situation into something private. All she sees at work is a combination of aggressive fastidiousness in those who have bern put in charge (and who in turn cause aggression in those they’re supposed to serve) and apathy/negligence in those who can afford to stand back and let the front line workers do the work.
Being one of those front line workers, I’m glad that I’m not one whose full attention is currently not in demand, and who can still delude themselves.
The lazy/bureaucrats may still have the upper hand right now, but that too will pass.
Thanks, Michael. It sounds like you have a unique perspective on this current epoch. BTW in an annual exercise in hope for the future, I planted 120 feet of garlic yesterday.
Cheers,
Brian
I too needed support in achieving it. Absence of TV/radio/papers, and a regular dose of John Michael Greer cell salts.
The only real downer right now is people getting sick with real disease. Get properly sick in this country if you also happen to be poor, and you’re hung out to dry. Yes indeed: we’ve largely Americanised our healthcare (amongst other things).
That amount of garlic might come in handy once people switch from buying toilet paper (we’ve got an actual second wave of that happening right now) to what Spengler calls Second Religiosity, including accompanying ritual ingredients.
Spengler makes his appearance, forever stacked in my too read pile.
After accusing me of stealing your next blog post topic with my most recent one, it’s my turn to do the same. Despite the respite afforded me by a lengthy visit to new surroundings, I came home to find essentially nothing changed besides increased anxiety over anticipated disruptions next month and sustained concern over problems that remain intransigently unresolved, with no one in government offering either solutions, merely token relief. The prospect of “more of the same” for the foreseeable future does not sound like stability or continuity but rather a recipe for disaster upon disaster as chickens come home to roost. That said, I won’t let your blog post deter me from collecting my thoughts and publishing something shortly.
Ah, well, turn around is fair play.
BTW readers (and I meant to put this in my “reading this weekend” notes), Brutus wrote a nice piece this week on dogs and a visit to our farm. Do check it out.: https://brutus.wordpress.com/2020/10/15/a-dogs-life/
Ahh, the tiresome challenge… the looming hardship. Trials for us all.
Such trial and tribulation has hounded our kind for millennia, no doubt. How we deal with it speaks to our individual character and inner strength. There is a passage in Abraham Lincoln’s speech to the Wisconsin State Fair:
“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” “
Aye, this too shall pass…
Clem,
Indeed, that approach is profoundly comforting. And, funny how that speech is making the rounds. I was referred to it a couple of weeks ago and read it for the first time.
Brian
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