That life on Earth is generally stable, not precarious. The grand, shared illusion that we are separate from nature. What the current crisis and our responses to it, both individual and institutional, have reminded us of is not the unreality of the pandemic, but the illusions shattered by it: That we have departed from it into strange territory.īut what if it’s exactly the other way around? What does it mean to say that this doesn’t feel real? The feeling seems to derive from the assumption that life before the pandemic, “normal” life, was real. The case count and death toll grow with each refresh of the page.Īnd yet some part of me still doesn’t want to accept that these calamities are really happening. More than 16 million people in the United States applied for unemployment over just three weeks. Stock-market convulsions have destroyed, in a matter of days, nest eggs built over decades. Of course, the global catastrophe unfolding is nothing but real.
Unreal, or its variations: not real, surreal, this can’t be real. Mostly, I hear it from my own mouth, because I haven’t left the house in a month, but also I hear it from friends on Zoom or Skype, and from the news on TV or online. One word I’ve been hearing a lot lately is unreal. I got about midway through page 3 and stopped. In the air is a growing feeling of incipient chaos. The protagonist, who works in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise, takes the elevator down to the lobby and walks out onto the street to find the world on pause, its social rhythms and commercial activity suspended.
Not time itself, just the convention of time. Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once.
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