June 9, 2021
It’s been raining wildly for days now. Bitter, flooding rain. Melbourne’s sense of metaphor is heavy-handed.
In this time at home, I’ve been running job interviews on Zoom, and they always start with the same 30 seconds of small talk.
Oh, you’re from Melbourne? I’m so sorry about the lockdown, how are you holding up?
It sucks, but we know the drill by now! Fourth time around the sun.
True!
It’s not true, of course. Each lockdown is different, intersects you at a different point of your life, bringing fresh worries and doubts. Last lockdown Mum wasn’t in hospital, and we weren’t at home fending for ourselves, camping out for news on her latest blood tests, the progress of her recovery, the variable date of her discharge.
Lockdown isn’t lockdown isn’t lockdown isn’t lockdown, because it’s always a new trip, around a new sun.
I’m home each time, but the I, the home, the time, are different.
Small talk doesn’t need to be true.
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I wrote that in my diary at the start of Lockdown 4, two months and a day ago. Like most things in that Google Doc (creatively titled ‘Diary’), it’s a little rough and unformed, but captures how I felt at a particular moment of time. Reading it back now, I can remember the frame of mind I was in, even if I can’t access it again.
Earlier this year a friend sent me an article from the New Yorker by Joshua Rothman, a long and learned look into the “uncanny allure of our unlived lives.” Beautifully crafted and quotable, with a volume of citations that made me wonder out loud “how does this guy read so much?!”, it was all about the people we could have become, but didn’t. “We begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” “Plural possibilities simmer down.”
When I read this article, I’d just moved out of home to Fitzroy, and new possibilities were opening up for me. I had a new house, a new job, a new mullet, and from that, a new lease on life. It was summer, and I felt free to be whoever I chose to become. A thousand lives stretched out in front of me.
It’s August now, and I’ve lived just one of them. All possibilities have vanished, save the one that’s brought me here, to this couch, writing this sentence that once may never have been. Things are as they are now, but could have been different. One door opened, but all others closed.
This idea, that we could be other than we are, has, as Rothman puts it, an “insistent, uncanny magnetism.” Whether “for a morning or a month”, at some point we all find ourselves asking: what if things were different? What if I were different. “Our lives thrum with the knowledge that it could have been otherwise.”
I think some of the pain of this last 18 months of COVID has been that thrum getting louder and louder. We’re more aware than ever that things could be different, that the life we have now is not the life we would have picked off the shelf.
Parties and weddings are postponed, travel plans dashed, great sporting moments missed. And all the while we find ourselves drifting into patterns and behaviours that don’t fit right. We scroll more, we scold more, we send more grumpy texts to Facebook group chats. Nothing is a choice, nothing is as we’d choose it to be, because this pandemic, as Ben Jenkins said in his own Substack, is the “slow and terrible realisation that we are not in control of anything, really”. Doors are opened for us, possibilities evaporate, and we feel this dull, present ache that isn’t sharp enough to make us scream, but needles and niggles and makes everything a bit more heavy and plodding.
In Being and Nothinginess, Sartre describes a man peering off the edge of a cliff, overwhelmed by the knowledge that if he chose to, he could lean off the edge and tumble down to his death. The only thing keeping him alive is his free will, and that realisation of the totality of his freedom is a moment of “vertigo”.
This COVID moment we’re experiencing is anti-vertigo, the overwhelming knowledge that we have no choices, that the parameters that dictate our lives are defined politically, socially, biologically, every -ly but personally, because nothing that we do personally can shift the needle an inch. Our feet are fixed on the ground, and we can’t move them, and that realisation brings us back and back and back to that question: what if things were different? What if this, of all my unlived lives, is the lowest?
I can hear that thrum.
It’s deafening sometimes.