Time is an odd phenomenon, now that we have had the time to feel it passing. Novelists and filmmakers toy with it, imagining it running parallel to itself, moving backward, varying its speed, freezing altogether. But I am not sure anyone ever imagined exactly this.
It is as if a vacuum has pulled loved ones out of families’ lives. One day, everything is normal. The next, they may be in a hospital but cannot be visited. Then they are gone, without even a glimpse goodbye.
In the age of COVID-19, it is good to think about some ways we have thought about illness in our music.
A pandemic is never only about biological contagion. Much of what we feel, think, and do—far more than I want to admit—is the product of what we perceive or unconsciously mimic in the world around us. Laughter, yawns, ideas, courage, and panic. All of that is contagion.
"The Common Reader," Washington University in St. Louis's Journal of the Essay, explores life and learning during the onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
The Herrin Massacre included the humiliation, wounding, and murder, by gun, rope, and knife, of unarmed men. Like the actions of any mob, it was irrational and grotesque, and there can be no defense of it. But there are better and lesser ways of telling stories. I have come to think of the massacre as an American tragedy, in which two old but opposed visions of our country were the seeds of conflict that may yet be our downfall.
"This moment is a great leveler. My inner resources are the opposite of capitalism—not to rely on anything other than your capacity to make stuff as a way of spending your time. I’ve always thought that. It’s all in the work. What I would say to my kids when they were going to school: be sure to make something today even if you’re making trouble. The idea is maker’s knowledge."
“Charles as a judge was never oppressive nor demeaning to lawyers,” says former Assistant U.S. Attorney David Rosen, now an adjunct law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “He erred on the side of being human.”
I had driven a few blocks, but pulled the car over. I looked at my daughter for a moment and realized that God does indeed give only ironic gifts.
In the middle of her life, fortunes falling, my mother bought a little car with the beauty of a well-made toy. It was economical, utilitarian, self-effacing, and anti-macho—all the things she needed or wanted at that point.