Postscript: Certain enough
2.25.23 | How we moved on from COVID even if it didn’t move on from us
Hello one last time.
There’s a truly superb piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend that tries to make sense of the pandemic using the research I and my colleagues at Columbia have been doing on social aspects of COVID. I want to let the article speak for itself, and encourage you in the strongest possible terms to read it in full (the link above is a “gift link,” so you should be able to access it even if you aren’t a Times subscriber).
I do want to draw your attention to one paragraph in particular, towards the end, that builds off of our work to sum up the current moment really nicely:
At first, the pandemic seemed to create potential for some big and benevolent restructuring of American life. But it mostly didn’t happen. Instead, [sociologist Ann Swidler] said, we seemed to treat the pandemic as a short-term hiccup, no matter how long it kept dragging on, and basically waited it out. “We didn’t strive to change society,” she told me. “We strived to get through our day.” Marooned in anomie and instability, we built little, rickety bridges to some other, slightly more stable place. “It’s amazing that something this dramatic could happen, with well over a million people dead and a public health threat of massive proportions, and it really didn’t make all that much difference,” Swidler said. “Maybe one thing it shows us is that the general drive to normalize things is incredibly powerful, to master uncertainty by feeling certain enough.”
There’s an ominous in-betweenness in this idea of our collectively feeling certain enough, just certain enough to get from one weird day into the next. I want to say it’s a new kind of feeling; not the chaos of the early pandemic, not the brusideness of social life just after the lockdowns. But definitely not, either, the heady end-of-history confidence of 1990s American culture, or the pervasive anxiety of the post 9/11 period, expecting some other shoe to drop (I always thought that anxiety was really well captured in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, which mixed household banality with fear of nut allergies, of terrorism, of misogynists erupting into shooting rampages, of pandemic influenza, generally of “the risk of collapse, the fact that the causes can be fracture, fatigue, crushing, tearing, rupture, shearing, deformation, and buckling”). Well the other shoe’s dropped. Now what?
Maybe the feeling is not really so new. The other day, as the story about our Covid archive was going to press, I went to see an exhibit of Edward Hopper paintings at the Whitney Museum. Hopper’s whole mood of early twentieth century anomie, suspense, and ambiguity felt unusually timely. But one painting, from 1935, caught my eye in a way I couldn’t shake. A white apartment house in a lazy summer dusk, backed by a lush treeline that whispers to you from the canvas. The streetlamp has just come on as the sunlight fades. The building is slightly askew. In one brightly lit window, a figure is propped up on her forearm, between the wars, just certain enough.