Ramblings on Time, Nostalgia and the Pandemic
A man such as I, who lives in the past to avoid the hell of the present and of the inevitable future, lives nostalgically nearly every day of my life. What do I mean, “living nostalgically”, and “liv[ing] in the past”? As I mentioned, the present is (figuratively) hell. As I write this the person with whom I live is tautophonically narrating his obsessive gaming into his holy headset, I am required to drown it out right now at this late hour by drilling into my ears foul and repetitive music of loud volume; the global situation concerning a certain virus at my time of writing this still seems somewhat bleak; governments are explicitly recommending their citizens (or subjects) to perform impersonal sexual acts in order to avoid contracting a particularly foul flu (the Canadian government recommends glory-holes); live music remains unthinkable and the opening of such events is not even on the table for discussion until apparently everyone in the world is vaccinated and/or one has his or her vaccination card ready… every facet of life is different from how it was in 2019. (The anecdote at the beginning of this sentence was just to add to my opinion that, particularly at my moment of writing as well as in general, life feels like hell.) During that beautiful, golden, fleeting year of good times, I was able to visit seedy restaurants and not have to situate a surgical mask onto my youthful visage; I was able to speak to anyone whom I pleased without having to worry about catching a virus, dying, inadvertently killing someone, and so on; life was still life: the vile vocable “Zoom” had never graced my innocent, inscient mind, and the thought that normal, every day aspects of life and social interactions would be replaced by some foul spyware known and required to be used by everyone was utterly unthinkable. Yet here we are.
This is what I mean when I say I live in the past: I am living in the past even as I write this. What have I been writing of almost this entire time? The past, and the present is a grotesque joke of it, what the past could have been, what the present should be. It recalls to my mind all those retro-futurist paintings and drawings, such as Syd Mead’s, of a utopian society living in harmony with floating cars and massive, benevolent metropolises; or, similarly, the brave and fleeting optimism of so many during the early 20th century, when man was becoming civilized, modern, and the future looked as bright as Edison’s electric lightbulb. But the future did not occur as man hoped, as is almost always the case. I hoped that the year 2020 would be much different than it turned out to be. I recall with sour humor and irony how optimistic everyone seemingly was at the beginning of that malodorous year; I cringe with sorrow and miserable internal laughter upon seeing a particularly impressive group of musicians performing in January or February or early March, or upon recalling the several events I had planned all the way up to May of that year and my lighthearted, naive eagerness for them.
I live in constant, pitiful nostalgia for the days before this pandemic and even the early days of it, when the gravity of the event had not yet struck me. Sentimentally I look back on how unaware I was of how life was to change so rapidly, how so many things were to be wrenched from my hands, how scelestic life would become. Nostalgia has now become one of the most prominent of my daily emotions: along with despair, despondency, self-loathing, riotous joy and occasional bouts of spiritual ecstasy spurred on usually by beautiful weather or the feeling of sun rays on my bare chest or legs, I often feel nostalgia affect me very strongly. It is, however, a poisonous and foul feeling to live in it constantly, wishing always that the past were different and that God had not dealt one a bad set of cards. Living in the past is a curse.
Yet I must live in the past: for the present is hell and the foreseeable future is only a mocking, despiteous parody of the way life used to be. For example, at the outset of the pandemic I was not extremely troubled by the repeated inculcation of media-consumers including myself with the phrase “New Normal”. I believed, sincerely and foolishly, that it was not meant to mean the literal new normal: it seemed they meant that, for the time being, perhaps half the year or slightly more, things would have to be this way, and then things would go back to normal. I was wrong. I see now that life as it was in those imperfect yet now idyllic days of 2019 and 2018 and much farther back is now extinct, and that now this hellacious, psychologically tortuous life of masking children who have not seen a coeval’s face for too long and online learning filled with depressed teachers and students with cameras off and spending days on an end at the computer is here to stay. Never again will I walk down the street without expecting or happening to see someone wearing a cloth mask dampened by furtive and oxygen-starved inhalations; and even now I feel slightly anxious when entering a convenience store mask-less unless I am either inebriated or particularly depressed.
Speaking of convenience stores, a curious thing happened, oh, about a month ago. I walked into a convenience store, procured what I gluttonously desired from the shelves and approached the counter to pay in immaterial, intangible currency for it. The depressed, moribund-looking cashier asked in a soul crushing voice, “Will this be all, sir?” to which I intoned: “Yes.” He was wearing a mask, and suddenly it hit me: I had never seen this man’s full face before, and in an instant that thought led to a striking revelation: that I could not even comprehend being in this convenience store with neither of us wearing masks and seeing each other’s faces and not having to stand an arbitrarily-chosen six feet apart. It just did not seem to be a viable possibility at any point, in the near future or otherwise. This thought terrified and depressed me. Ah, foul world… fickle fate!
To whomever is reading this, even if it is just myself, do not lose hope. Despite my coming close to doing so nearly every day, I recommend that you keep holding out for better days, the sunshine ahead, the light at the end of the tunnel. If we cannot hope, we have nothing. And as for now, the present: go to a park. Read a book in the sunshine. Try to, if you have not already, find a higher purpose. Smile at people as you pass them on the street. Exercise. And, most importantly, hope.
