shelter in place
March 18 - June 25, 2020: 100 words per day for 100 days
What is up with this guy? All year he posts maybe once a month, mostly about the adventures of a fictional sea captain, and now three posts in a week? What can I tell you? It’s summer and I’m not teaching and I have a lot of things on my mind.
One of them is shelter in place, the ebook I’ve put together of the hundred-word prose pieces—call them prose poems, or reviews, or simply hundreds—that I began writing for my blog back on March 18, 2020, a few days after the pandemic made its debut and the world became frighteningly quiet. Too discombobulated to work on other projects, I resolved to keep myself sane by practicing a form of attention within an arbitrary frame: one hundred words each day, accompanied by an iPhone photograph that would in some way complement or reflect the feeling for that day. My original plan was to do this until the pandemic was over—do you remember how we all thought it would somehow pass in a few weeks or months? When it became clear that this wouldn’t be the case, I decided to keep it up for one hundred days, for the symmetry of the thing. Call it the first season of the new normal.
It proved to be a useful discipline, a routine, a little bit like walking a dog: it got me out into the neighborhood, noticing little changes that might otherwise have passed me by. The hundreds became a container for the anxiety I felt; paired sometimes enigmatically with photos, they expressed the peculiar qualities of a quiet life ringed all around by terror. They became, in a muted way, my apocalypse diary. Reading it now seems revelatory, a kind of X-ray of one world as it ceased to exist and gave way to another.
As the days turned into weeks, daily life retained its shape, smoother and less striated than it had been when we all left the house every day for school and work, and again in the evenings and on weekends to go to movies, plays, restaurants, and the homes of friends. Our apartment shrank. I walked for hours every day, trying to keep claustrophobia at bay. One serious blessing was our building, which functioned as a pod and so offered us a social life. There were cookouts in the backyard the moment it was warm enough. There were cocktail parties on the stairs.
Eternity, Blake tells us, is in love with the creations of Time. When I look back on those first months it feels as if we were dwelling in eternity, in an ever-expanding present without boundaries. But time was on the march, history intruded: the election year ground along, the 45th President continued to terrorize and astound us. And then came that terrible day in Minneapolis when George Floyd was killed; another sort of revelation, of the injustice as plain as the noses on our faces. So politics came into it, and our wounded public life.
Something like normal life has resumed since I wrote the hundredth hundred, and sometimes it feels like life will never be normal again. The social fabric is badly torn: by a rogue Supreme Court, by bullets sprayed from AR-15s, by war, by heat waves, and above all by the inability or unwillingness of our institutions to do anything about the above. Yet the ordinary—a word with order at its root, and beneath that simply an arrangement, a counting, as in the row of threads in a loom—stickily persists. It saves us, keeps us engaged with what’s nearest—work, home, friends, family—and it also insulates us strangely, so that when we do engage with the world, it’s in a spirit of hysteric urgency, stripped of nuance, armored against listening, obsessed with purity. The ordinary is the enemy of the world as a place in which we might live. But how could we possibly do without it?
I had thought about publishing this little book in the usual ways, but the photos are important and color is expensive; instead I’ve turned it into an ebook which for a limited time you can download for free from my website. I hope that you will, and that you’ll tell others who might be interested.
