AS TIME GOES BY
A pandemic paradox
We reminisce, three childhood friends, each of us separated by thousands of miles and divergent adulthoods — a triangulation of space and time.
After all, what else do we have to do? What is left to us but memory? The present is in lockdown. The future is on hold. For the time being, only the past remains. So we mine it, our emails to each other filled with nuggets of bright remembered summers, girlfriends, ball games, music and recollections of those friends and acquaintances who, with increasing frequency, have died. (When I read about them, my own mortality whispers in my ears, “They were my age.”) The comfort in this melancholy work? There is so much of the past to be dug up.
At least there is that. A trove. A long life led.
This is the one advantage the pandemic has bestowed upon the old: While the virus may more readily kill us, we managed to get a lot of years under our belts before being fettered by masks and social distancing and fear. We spent those years as freely as we did loose change.
With that in mind, let us consider the young. Their pasts are truncated, their futures increasingly characterized by limitation. As if lives of inordinate debt and the existential threat of climate change were not burden enough, along comes a virus that frustrates the only thing left to them and that which they do best — having fun. Now all life, and not just sex, has become one of prophylaxis in which “responsibility” is a scold word that demands they abstain from anything that once caused them joy — partying, dancing, hooking up, getting high, goofing off ... in other words, innocently acting irresponsibly, as the young always have.
And so when I see news footage of young people partying in groups — footage that is meant to cause outrage among people my age
— my ire, which I admit to being considerable, is tempered by pity. I remind myself that my reality was, and is, completely unlike theirs, and that their reality is, and will be, more fraught with anxiety.
Not so with my generation. The postwar 20th-century and early 21st-century generations in the developed world were unlike other generations, past and future, in that they enjoyed the luxury of comprehending time differently. We regarded time — if we regarded it at all — optimistically, and undisturbed by the possibility of catastrophe other than that of the personal. Time for us was a steady, non-threatening, uninterrupted progression of events in our lives that we came to expect as our due — graduations, marriage, children, summer vacations, trips overseas, Super Bowls and Stanley Cups, retirement. We did not mark time, we took it for granted. We thought in terms of “careers” and “goals” and “lifestyles” that played out over long expanses of time untouched by either the possibility of death or disruption. “Hope I die before I get old,” The Who sang in My Generation, but that was bravado and a complete misreading of the zeitgeist. We planned on running marathons in our 90s. We expected to live forever. Time lost its urgency.
“Clocks slay time,” William Faulkner wrote in The Sound and The Fury. “Time is dead as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
And not so long ago, the clock stopped with despairing regularity. World wars, genocide, slavery, plagues that emptied continents, high infant and maternal mortality rates, economic depressions great and small, child labour, regular outbreaks of pre-vaccine diseases of cholera, polio, measles, mumps, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, yellow fever and chickenpox that killed hundreds of thousands each year — death's catalogue and time's disruption were part of life the living learned to accommodate.
“Just imagine,” a friend said recently, “what people had to go through in the Second World War! Aside from the enormous amount of death and destruction, think of how mentally exhausting it must have been for those who were living through it. A year goes by and the war is raging. And then it's still going on for a second year. And then a third year, and a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth year! I can't imagine what it took to get through it.”
Who of us now can? Not I. And while she spoke of the war, we were sitting together on the beach, eating snacks and sipping hot chocolate. We were socially distanced from each other, but at least we enjoyed the luxury of being social. Our children and grandchildren were safe, and no one in our families had died of the virus. The death toll worldwide was approaching 2.5 million, but the rollout of vaccines had begun less than a year after the first cases were reported. By observing the right preventive measures, the pandemic for many of us had been not much more than an inconvenience, and for many others it had been more of a threat to their livelihoods than to their lives.
Compare that to an estimated 20 million deaths in the First World War, followed by 50 million dead from the Spanish Flu at war's end. Estimates of death during the Second World War range from 60 million to 75 million people — a hugely imprecise figure due to the widespread and indiscriminate carnage. Think of it: So many lives lost. So many put on hold or robbed of fulfilment that they defied counting. All that time obliterated.
And here we are, in the postponed now, in which the peculiar contradictory nature of this pandemic both robs us of time and leaves us with too much of it on our hands. For my generation, it is our first taste of catastrophe, or, at the very least, disruption. It has left us alone with ourselves, where we are forced to examine not just the nature of time but what we have done with it. It can make for uncomfortable introspection.
So when someone talks of wanting things to return to normal, I think it's not really normality they want. I think they want the clocks to start ticking again, and time to stop.
(For youths) `responsibility' is a scold word that demands they abstain from anything that once caused them joy — partying, dancing, hooking up ...