Notes on the Plague Year

I passed our first pandemic year trying to remain normal in Bloomington-Normal. As a 73-year-old retired professor of German, I needed to stay active and connected. Via Zoom, I took courses in Russian and French and became good friends with my instructors. I drove older or indigent patients to their hospital appointments and heard from them about life outside my academic orbit. I got to know students who are open to the kind of intellectual interaction that developing minds crave. When the weather was good, we would meet in Franklin Park for beer, pizza, and conversation. When it got too cold, we talked through our masks in the spacious Uptown Station waiting room. I would bring a thermos of hot cider spiked with rum to sustain the mood.

Trump kept us focused on the larger scheme of things. He hovered over our conversation without dominating it. My student friends and I shared an interest in books, history, and politics. We had a critical affinity with the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America)—critical insofar as we supported its objectives but were very skeptical about its organizational strengths. My younger friends brought me up to date on a new normal which I had managed to ignore. They introduced me to Chapo Trap House and the “dirtbag left” and talked about their online romances. I decided that what I experienced at their age might be worth passing on to others.

When Andrew, my oldest and closest student friend, suggested that we collaborate on a blog with others in our circle, I thought that this might be an opportunity to set down the thoughts and recollections focused by the pandemic year. For me that involves taking soundings of my inner life and then connecting the dots. Unlike other responses to the COVID crisis, mine won’t be in the prophetic mode.

As with most of us, there is some personal darkness in the background of these bright spots in my life during the year; but private darkness isn’t my topic here. I read somewhere about a publisher who, only half in jest, declared it his policy to reject any manuscript that mentioned cancer or cats on the first page. I intend to leave out all purely personal wailing and gnashing of teeth, all self-indulgent doomsaying, all pseudo explanations of conduct and thinking with which I disagree as merely “stupid”—a kind of moral masturbation that poses as a declaration of principle. What I want to explore and share is a partial and tentative answer to the question who we are and what we have in us to become.

Signed,

Andrew (Weeks)