Connecting During the Coronavirus
I stumbled across two pieces about how we talk to one another right now. Toward the beginning of “A New Connection with the Lost Art of Phone Conversation,” author Daphne Merkin observes,
The old-fashioned fuddy-duddy telephone—which once seemed as dated as Dorothy Parker’s short story “The Telephone Call,” in which a young woman waits desperately for a man to call—is suddenly back in style.
Forgive the pun, but that rings true for me. Although no one would mistake me for gabby.
The second piece wonders “Why Is Zoom So Exhausting?” It’s from The Chronicle of Higher Education, so the focus is on teaching:
Professors flocked to the platform once they learned they’d be teaching remotely for several weeks; then several weeks became the rest of the semester. Many appreciate having the technology to see the faces of students they had expected to keep seeing in person. The faces of students they worried about, students they missed. Many professors hoped to replicate the in-person experience as closely as they could. But one word comes up time and again when they talk about teaching on the platform, or using it for meetings….. Exhausting.
This also rings true, although I might add words like grateful and annoying. I both love and hate video chats, and that’s been true for years. Not sure what is going on with that.
Will We Miss this Time?
A lot of people are saying this pandemic will change how we live. Yes and no. We’ll certainly be more health aware for some time. But I suspect we’ll end up being as busy and distracted as we’ve ever been, once some semblance of normalcy returns. I love the slow and quiet pace of life right now. But I’m an introvert. A Canadian, who I suspect is an extrovert, sees other delights amidst the deeply troubling realities all around us--in “Lockdown Nostalgia”:
What in it would we miss? The solidarity, local and international, in fighting the pandemic. The creativity sprouting from cracks in a daily routine. It is spring, yet it is not to spring alone that we can attribute the new art, literature, films, music, and theatre. Quiz nights in the window, anyone? Concerts on the balcony? A Decameron-challenge, telling a story a day to pass the time? Home improvement and bricolage? Human making has rarely been so resourceful. Despite the flood of anxiety, the limitation of our means obliges us to look around, rummage through drawers and cupboards, and make worlds out of nothing much.
Comprehending Kierkegaard
Every since I read Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everyone: Difficult Thought Made Easy, I have my eye out for anything that helps me navigate the rougher seas of philosophy and theology. One person I often find incomprehensible and yet enticing is Soren Kierkegaard. I suspect this fine review matches the book in making this difficult philosopher a bit more approachable, one reason being is that the focus is on Kierkegaard’s insight into living well.
Like this passage I ran across in a collection of his more accessible writings, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard:
Ah! So much is spoken about human need and misery and how to overcome it. So much is spoken about wasting our lives. But the only wasted life is the life of him who has so lived it, deceived by life's pleasures or its sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as I self. Or if I may put it another way, he has never become aware--and gained in the deepest sense the impression--that there is a God and that “he,” himself, is answerable to and exists before this God, and that this God can only be met by way of despair.
Kierkegaard strikes me as a philosopher for a time when despair makes itself known more than usual.
Solitary Pleasures
Speaking of simpler times and life styles, as we did above, here is a poignant video of “rock cowboys” reflecting on their lives.
Grace and peace,
Mark Galli
markgalli.com