Lamentations

For me, COVID began on March 13, 2020. That's the day we were all sent to work from home for two weeks. Looking back through my emails, it was clear that no one had any idea what was about to happen. 

I have little memory of what I thought, but I can't have been feeling too pessimistic about the fate of humanity — I got pregnant a couple weeks later. 

And here we are, five years on, and our collective ability to prognosticate has not improved. Every meeting I go to now involves some kind of lamentation about "these dark times." Someone casually asserted that we are "kneecapping the next generation" in a meeting today. The department I work for has a faculty slack channel which mirrors my LinkedIn feed — a litany lamentations about the collapse of modern science. Even before all the Trump bullshit, every meeting involved some version of "what if she doesn't win?!" handwringing. What if, indeed. 

On the other side, those living Trump's paradise feel basically as despondent as their vanquished foes. They are doing their best to stem the overwhelming tide of civilizational collapse. Children are being mutilated by doctors and poisoned by big pharma as we speak. Free speech is impossible, free thinking a crime. Liberalism is disintegrating as we scroll merrily on our phones. In a generation, there will be no more children. 

Honestly, it's all I can do not to roll my eyes so hard they fall out of my head. 

On November 8, 1989, no one foresaw that the Berlin Wall would fall the next day. (Soviet experts are still weeping for the unfinished dissertations.) I have no memory of portents issued on September 10, 2001. December 7, 1941 lives in infamy. In June 2015, no one except Trump thought Trump would be president. 

Maybe the world is ending. Maybe AI will infect my brain and steal my job. Maybe my children will be fighting in Taiwan in 2045. 

You know what's much more likely? A future we have not predicted and can't even begin to imagine. It's possible something is coming for us. If it is, my only guess is that it's something we haven't considered yet. That's generally how catastrophes happen. 

For most people this is probably too scary to contemplate, but I take great solace in the fact that while people have been forecasting the end of the world for millennia, we are somehow still here, living in unbelievable comfort at the pinnacle of technological progress. 

The world may be ending, but spring is here and I just took a walk around campus where the leadership has a stockpile of 34 billion dollars to use for the preservation of something resembling knowledge. Later I will retrieve my healthy children, load them into seats that have been rigorously tested to protect them, and go to our house, where everyone has their own bed, the air is automatically conditioned, and our water is cleaned by a UV filter. I will use my tiny computer to play us any piece of music we can think of while preparing food that is fresh and plentiful. 

I could lose all this tomorrow, yes. But that is always true. I could get hit by a bus. I could lose my job. My children could get sick. There could be a natural disaster or a nuclear holocaust. Should this make me more or less miserable today? Why is it so hard to imagine that things might work out in the end? 

Ideas, ideas, ideas

The main reason I left academia is that I didn't think I had enough interesting things to say about the 20ish books I was an expert on to sustain me through a 40 year career. Basically, I just couldn't imagine giving the same lecture on Nietzsche until I was 65 (or 80, or whenever faculty will retire in the 2050/2060s). 

I came to this conclusion fairly early on and it was reinforced constantly in graduate school. A professor I studied with, who was a wonderful teacher, told me he went back and reread the books for his introductory class every 5 years or so, "just to keep the subject fresh." After TA'ing his class (which was excellent) I had a feeling he hadn't refreshed his lectures in way more than a decade. He didn't need to — he knew what he thought about Marx and what he thought about Marx was interesting to freshmen. The idea of doing this myself, though, made me miserable. 

The problem, of course, is that I hate lecturing and love reading. I never found teaching Plato very gratifying, but I often wish I had time to reread The Republic. (I've only done it once since graduating, sadly.) I am grateful that I knew myself well enough at 25 to realize that a life as a professor would make me miserable.  

I rarely have any occasion to remember this, though, since I have been out of academia for so long. It's occurring to me now because I got an email that my dissertation adviser was speaking on a panel about the future of conservatism. (My dissertation adviser is, according to his new updated bio, a "leading public intellectual of the New Right." Insert puking emoji here.) 

I was quite intrigued! The man I knew was hardly so political. Would he actually talk about politics as a representative of the New Right?? Or would he give the same talk about Tocqueville that I have heard him give a hundred times to every type of audience (grad students, freshmen, faculty, the general public)? 

And it was the latter, of course. A talk remarkably similar to one I heard him give for the first time in a graduate seminar 15 years ago. He even opened with the same story about reading Democracy in America for the first time as an unemployed graduate student and realizing he would work on the book for the rest of his life. I have heard that story at least 20 times, and he is still telling it. 

I remain a big fan of my adviser, notwithstanding his insane politics. When Josh and I were first married we had him over to dinner and it is likely to remain the best dinner party of my life. (There was no small talk, he did not even ask about our recent wedding. We talked about ideas from the first minute to the last.) And his talk about Tocqueville is, believe it or not, still interesting! I watched the whole panel when I definitely should have been doing something else. 

I am not saying there is anything wrong with having a few good ideas and then refining and repeating them for 40 years. I'm just really happy that I don't have to.

Historical travels

For some unknown reason, I picked up a book about the Plantagenets at the library a few weeks ago. Not a scholarly book, a pop history book. (I don't know if any scholars write straight up histories that cover hundreds of years anymore? I haven't seen any lately.) 

Why did I pick up this book? I don't know, exactly. Sometimes I just want to read something totally foreign to my present experience and I find that there is nothing better for this than history. Most people would probably choose SciFi or something, but to me history is even more amazing because it's (nominally) true. I know humans have never colonized Mars, but Richard III really did lock both of his nephews in a tower and (possibly) murder them.

Life back then was so mysterious. Healthy young people would drop dead for no apparent reason. A king would suddenly go mad. One royal couple failing to produce a boy could change the future of a whole country. And another having too many boys could do the same. Imagine living in a world where anything could happen — death, plague, famine, war — and you'd have no explanation other than God! Now I get mad if the weather report is off by a couple hours. 

I love modernity, but I so enjoyed my time with the Plantagenets that I also read books on the War of the Roses and the Tudors. I am now fully caught up on medieval English history! Though they do make things exceptionally difficult by naming every single king Edward, Henry or Richard for 400+ years. I never thought twice about the name Edward, and now I hate it. 

My new theory is that Elizabeth made such a mark because everyone could remember which one she was! The thesis of my next dissertation.