Tag Archives: Christopher Lasch

Fatigue

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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/

Living at 1.5 Speed

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Newly harvested winter squash

“Nothing important comes into being overnight; even grapes and figs need time to ripen. If you say that you want a fig now, I will tell you to be patient. First, you must allow the tree to flower, then put forth fruit; then you have to wait until the fruit is ripe.”—Epictetus

I enjoy boring people with the same punchline over and over. When asked how long it takes to make my gumbo (or a similar dish) I say, “Two years. A year to raise the hog to make the sausage, and two years for the rooster to mature, become useful at breeding, and then become even more useful for the pot.” The point, of course, is the same as that of Epictetus, one reinforced daily by farming, that small pleasures and life necessities take time. The process, the journey, if you will, is wed to the destination. One does not happen without the other. Be patient.

Some time back I was weeding in the garden with one of my apparently endless supply of nephews. We were chatting about reading books and listening to audiobooks, and he stopped me with a comment about his habit of listening to books at 1.5 times the speed of the normal recording. His reasoning was simple: he has limited time and an endless number of things he would like to listen to, so he speeds up the book so he can get on to the next one.

That comment, uttered as we yanked pigweed among the rows of tomato plants, has stuck with, and troubled, me ever since. Not because I think my nephew may be short-changing his experience while listening to whatever young adult schlock he has chosen to waste time on, but because his thinking so clearly encapsulates the zeitgeist of the millennium. That is, by putting one’s senses into overdrive, one can, even should, increase one’s experiences.

Perhaps it is our age difference. His life’s project is before him. Mine is clouded by the uncertain murk of a future too fast approaching, with a timeline of anywhere from another 32 years to … yikes, tomorrow. Regardless, his comment seemed emblematic, a touchstone, of our culture at large.

I sympathize (even as I do not comprehend) with a desire to experience more in life, to get more done. What I object to is the speed with which let us call them 1.5ers expect their experiences to wash over their lives like endless waves, skipping steps in a process that should be savored.

You cannot truly read a book without starting at page one and ending at the final word. Likewise, you cannot raise a child to be a responsible adult by concentrating only on years 2 and 13, cannot become a farmer by simply purchasing a parcel of land. Each act is an essential part of the play. Learning to see and experience the whole cycle, being patient for it, is part of the joy in living. Perhaps then, the lesson to be learned for those 1.5er moments in each of our lives is this: Those things we feel the need to rush are not worth pursuing. In leaving them unpursued, we allow more time for anticipating and then enjoying the ripened figs in the years we do have.

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Reading this weekend: Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (C. Lasch) and What’s Wrong With the World (G.K. Chesterton)