An afternoon walk in downtown Monterey

We voted today--that is, completed our ballots: black pen, neatly filled in ovals. And because we didn't want to wait until tomorrow, when our city hall's dropbox will be available during business hours, to actually cast our votes, we decided to drive to downtown Monterey to avail ourselves of the public library's 24/7 dropbox. Done! Voted! Voilà! (Thank God we don't live in Texas.)

And then, why not just do our afternoon walk from there? Which took us to these localities, one of which—the Sloat Landing monument—we have never visited in our thirty years in this town:

The bears on the lawn in
front of Colton Hall,
where the California constitution
was signed in 1849.

Books (Leon Uris! I haven't thought about him
in 40 years), shoes, and a bag of clothes.
Left for some reason on a streetcorner.

Sloat Landing monument—30 years I've lived here,
and I'd never been up here.

Cooper-Molera Adobe,
at the top of Alvarado.

My favorite trees. I especially love them in winter
when they've lost their leaves,
but they sure looked lovely today.

Book Report: Travelers

 26. Halon Habila, Travelers (2019) (10/7/2020)

This novel of six linked "books" is a moving exploration of the refugee crisis in Africa and Europe. It kaleidoscopically introduces us to individuals from Nigeria, Malawi, Libya, Zambia, and Somalia, as well as Berlin, Switzerland, Italy, and England, all of whom become tied up in the crisis in one way or another: as refugees themselves, as those who befriend and try to help refugees; in one case, through a tragic mix-up, a Nigerian man is mistakenly placed in a settlement camp, where he experiences firsthand the despair that so many feel. Kaleidoscopic and also reflected as if through a hall of mirrors as characters appear briefly in one story, and then become the main storytellers or subjects of a third person's narrative in another. The ultimate effect is a contradictory one: hope mixed with anguish and desperation. It is also, however, a novel of the indominability of the human spirit. Hope prevails, despite all odds.

In an essay in 2019, Habila—originally from Nigeria himself, but since 2005 settled in Virginia, a professor at George Mason University—described how he came to write the book.

I was [in Berlin on a fellowship in 2013] to work on a novel; it was six months already and I still hadn’t figured out what my novel was going to be about. I couldn’t seem to settle down, my writing kept getting interrupted by political events that I just couldn’t ignore.
 My country was roiling under Boko Haram Islamic militancy, and I kept following the news trying to make sense of it all. Could this be the country I knew, the peaceful, sleepy region where I grew up? How could things have changed so drastically in just 15 years? At night I dreamt of my family back home being attacked by fundamentalist hordes. Two hundred and seventy-six school girls had been kidnapped by the militants. How could I intervene as a writer, what could I write to console the families of those girls who might never know freedom again? At times like this, one realizes how puny the pen is compared to the sword. I was drawn to the migrants I started encountering in the streets of Berlin because of the violence in my home country which had already displaced over a million people, some of them already here in Berlin, some in Italy, and some drowned in the cold waters of the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe.

At the same time, he met two migrants seeking asylum in Germany, one Somali, one Pakistani, both from vastly different backgrounds. They asked him to tell their stories. And the final ingredient:

A German newspaper had approached me to write something about a recent tragedy—on October 3, 2013, a boat carrying over 300 migrants from Libya had sunk in the Mediterranean off the coast of Lampedusa, killing all on board, mostly women and children. What could one write in the face of such a staggering cataclysm? How do you get to the heart of it, how do you express your sorrow at the loss, your rage at the politicians back home who let this happen under their watch, and the right-wing politicians in Europe who seek to demonize these helpless but determined voyagers for political gain?  

And so Travelers came to be.  

I wasn't impressed by the technical quality of the writing (I found it somewhat clumsy, the characters a bit flat) so much as by the stories told and the vehicles used for the telling: the various narrators, the use of letters or second-hand accounts in addition to first-person narratives. Also the many details, of refugee camps in Berlin, Bulgaria, Italy, France; of years-long flights through foreign lands; of these people's reception when they finally find a possible home. Habila makes the unfamiliar familiar, and at the same time throws the familiar into question. This book, about such an important issue, has great heart and soul.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's only been four days since my last accounting of Covid-19 in Monterey County, when numbers stood at 10,312 (total infections), 610 (hospitalizations), and 75 (deaths). Today the numbers are 10,475, 623, and 78: up 163, 13, and 3, respectively; since yesterday, up 42, 4, and 3. I keep waiting for the rise to cease. But it does seem to be slowing down at least.

Book Report: Lost Children Archive

25. Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019) (10/3/2020)

In the summer of 2014, the Mexican-born Luiselli took a trip with her husband and two children across the US, from New York City to New Mexico. On the way, while listening to the radio, they became increasingly aware of the plight of Central American migrants, especially children, on the US-Mexican border, and when she returned to New York she volunteered as an interpreter in the immigration court. Those are the kernels of this intricate novel about a family road trip, a disintegrating marriage, disappearing refugee children, the final days of the Apaches in Arizona, and the heartland of America. 

The story is first told by the unnamed narrator, a sound documentarian who remains throughout rather aloof and in her head. We never learn her name, or those of her husband (who also collects sounds, though his are ambient, hers are spoken stories) or children, who are referred to simply as "the boy" (10 years old) and "the girl" (5), each brought to the marriage from earlier relationships. They are heading to Arizona so the husband can document the "echoes" of Apacheria, and the woman has the goal of documenting the border crisis, as well as finding the two vanished children of a Mixteca acquaintance she'd met in New York. 

In the second (of four) parts, the boy takes over the narration, at first retelling from his perspective, and with his own noticings, some of what the mother had told about in part one. And then the story takes a right turn and begins to merge with that of an (invented) book with a red cover, Elegies for Lost Children by Ella Camposanto, about young refugees, which is doled out piecemeal. All of the boy's story is told in epistolary fashion, as a recounting for his little sister, whom he realizes he probably won't be living with anymore once the trip is done.

The presentation is eclectic, and full of sophisticated literary allusions, especially in part one. Featured in the story are seven bankers boxes and their "archival" contents, four belonging to the husband, one to the narrator, and one each for the children—though the latter two remain empty until the end of the book; these contents are listed between the long chapters, in very short, titled sections. Elegies for Lost Children is presented elegy by elegy, in scattered fashion. There are maps and Border Patrol reports, Polaroid pictures and newspaper clippings. One chapter of 19 pages is a single sentence.

Here are a few samples of the writing. First, the woman, as she rereads Susan Sontag's journals and finds underlining:

This last line ["The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal"] is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don't remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

The book is not all so heady. This is a road trip, after all, with young children. They sing "Space Oddity" and "Graceland" over and over in the car, they stop overnight in motels and eat in diners, they visit Asheville, NC, and the Fort Sill, Oklahoma, cemetery where Geronimo is buried. The five-year-old keeps asking what "Jesus Fucking Christ" means. There is plenty of life in this book.

I did not, as I read, flag any of the boy's narration (again, as told, in a letter-like way, to his sister), but let's see if I can find a sample. Okay, here, at random, as they arrive in New Mexico:

This whole country, Papa said, is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don't matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history, he said.
 He spoke like this sometimes, and when he did, he was usually looking out through a window or at some corner. Never at us. When we were still back in our old apartment, for example, and he got mad at us for something we'd done or maybe not done, he would look straight at the bookshelf, not at us, and say words like responsibility, privilege, ethical standards, or social commitments. Now he was talking about this whirlpool of history, and erased lives, and was looking through the windshield at the curvy road ahead as we drove up a narrow mountain pass, where there were no green things growing, no trees, no bushes, nothing alive, only jagged rocks and trunks of trees split in half as if old gods with giant axes had got angry and chopped this part of the world apart.
 What happened here? you [the little sister] asked, looking out the window, though you didn't usually notice landscapes.
 Papa said: Genocide, exodus, diaspora, ethnic cleansing, that's what happened.
 Ma explained that there had probably been a recent forest fire.

Although the father is presented as passionate here, in fact he is a rather flat character, focused largely on his fascination with the Apaches and, yes, his general simmering anger. The story is very much about the mother and the boy, their complementary realities as they journey forward into the unknown. 

I enjoyed the book, which bore a strong similarity to much contemporary fiction that I've been reading lately: the short sections, a constantly shifting narrative focus, the lack of quotation marks to denote dialogue, a somewhat distant narrator (especially the woman), the unnamed protagonists. It is intelligent and a bit cool—which is fine. But for my next book, I might look for something with more warmth and intimacy. 

P.S. Luiselli also wrote a nonfiction account of her investigation into the migrants on the border in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017). It is a relatively short book, and one that I will be seeking out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On 9/17, a little over two weeks ago, the Covid-19 numbers for Monterey County stood at 9,550 confirmed cases, 553 hospitalizations, and 67 deaths. Today's numbers are 10,312 (up 762), 610 (up 57), and 75 (up 8). The pace of growth has slowed, though those affected remain largely in the Salinas Valley (83%), Hispanic (78%), and younger (69% are younger than 44) . . . so, agricultural and service workers, no doubt; people who can't afford to quarantine and who work in jobs that require close contact with others. As Trump with his army of doctors makes very clear today, the privileged have much less to worry about. Though he is not out of the woods simply because he's privileged. We'll see what his arrogance brings him. Assuming he really is sick, which I'd rather not doubt, but he is a professional liar, and his campaign is in trouble.

Book Report: The Devil's Highway

 24. Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story (2004, with an afterword from 2014) (9/17/2020)

The Devil's Highway is a harrowing story about the "Yuma 14"—aka Wellton 26—a group of Mexican men who attempted, in May 2001, to cross the mountainous southern Arizona desert in the company of a guía with inadequate experience, to pursue opportunity in the US that was nonexistent at home. "Wellton 26" refers to the Border Patrol (BP) station that responded to a call of "bodies," maybe alive, maybe dead, in the desert, and the number of victims. "Yuma 14" refers to the BP sector in which they were found, and the ultimate number of dead.

The story begins with five men stumbling "out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn't know their own names, couldn't remember where they'd come from, had forgotten how long they'd been lost." The scene is fully, viscerally imagined and described: the ferociously shimmering heat; the men's black-burnt skin and lips, their hair hardened from dried sweat; their hallucinations, their desperation.

We then learn a bit about the history of the "white man" in this region, a bit about native myths, a bit about natural history—stories that come almost as welcome relief from the men's suffering. 

And then another key player is introduced: the Border Patrol, in the form of an agent, "Mike F.," who finds these five wandering souls, and then learns that there are up to 21 more whose fate is unknown. Immediately, an all-out search & rescue operation is mounted. 

The story told is experiential, sometimes slowing down to a walking pace as we follow the migrants (or as the BP calls them, "undocumented entrants") on their journey, one that starts out hopeful and ends up horrific. But it also delves deeply into structural components of this complicated drama that plays out every day along our southern border: the wants and needs and dreams of the walkers themselves; the convoluted society of the smugglers; the Border Patrol's dedication to their task. No one is a hero, or a villain, exactly. It is, unfortunately, just the way things go in a world out of balance.

As Luis explains in his 2014 afterword, 

When the research began, Jesús Lopez Ramos [the guide] was presented to me as the "bad guy." Soon his defenders made a strong case for the Border Patrol being the "bad guy." Law enforcement made a strong case for the smugglers being the "bad guys." And I knew that popular culture, as expressed in talk radio for example, considered the "illegals" the "bad guys." It was my field experience with [BP] supervisory agent Ken Smith that led to the epiphany. If I was going to write a book hoping to deal with the issue fairly, how could I write it with a prejudice toward Ken and his brothers in forest green? Once that key turned in the lock, the tone of the narrative opened for me. I have to trust my readers to make up their own minds. Even if that means reaching decisions I didn't intend for them to reach.

The writing is lyrical, full of sensuous detail. We are introduced to the desert itself as geography becomes a character in the story. And even before we get to the desert:

They saw many wonders as they traveled north. In some of their ancient beliefs, north was the direction of death. North was the home of winter, and the underworld could be found there. They went from jungle to rain forest to pine forest, from pines to plains, and from plains to desert and volcanoes.
 They gawked at the worms of snow on the highest peaks. They stared at the pine trees, the roadside deer. The big cities were no more amazing than the dry lands they entered, the maguey and burros of the heartland, the cacti and plains of the north. The ones who knew geography told the others where they were—the states with the strange names: Zacatecas, Chihuahua. They passed through a hundred towns, a scattering of cities. They crossed little rivers, watched a thousand beaten cafés and gas stations whip by, burned out hulks of ancient car wrecks, white crosses erected along the highway where their ancestral travelers had perished. The whole way was a ghost road, haunted by tattered spirits left on the thirsty ground: drivers thrown out windows, revolutionaries hung from cottonwoods or shot before walls, murdered women tossed in the scrub. Into the Sierra Madre Occidental, the opposite side of their continent....
 Mexican towns full of Mexicans, so like them, yet so different from Veracruz.

Luis is a master of lists. There is an amazing section midway where he outlines in excrutiating detail the six stages of heat death. "They are the same for everyone. It doesn't matter what language you speak, or what color your skin. Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways": heat stress, heat fatigue, heat syncope, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke.

But most remarkable is the humanity in this book, something that is hardly surprising if you've read other books by Urrea, or heard him do a reading, or workshopped with him, or interact with him on Facebook. (He is the instigator of Operation Uplift, which I've written about a couple of times, as here.) And so, one final passage; this takes place after Mendez, the guide, has left the group, ostensibly to find water and help:

The day tormented them. Thirst. Pain. Men crawled under creosotes, under the scant shade of scraggly mesquites. It was a dull repetition of the entire walk. As rote as factory work. Their hours clanged by like machines. They were in the dirt like animals.
 Six o'clock in the morning took ten hours to become seven o'clock.
 A week later, it was eight o'clock.
 The temperature screamed into the nineties before nine o'clock.
 They waited. They couldn't even talk. They panted like dogs, groaned. Men put their hands to their chests, almost delicately, as if checking their own pulses. But they were barely awake. They were half in dreams and half in the day, and the day itself was a bad dream. Dry wings swished in the air around them. Voices, coughing. Far above, the ice silver chips of airplanes cut the blue. Out of reach.

It's an amazing book. And it reinforces a sense of the humanity that is trapped today at our border, in detention camps, and the inhumanity of our current administration, and, I would add, of the higher-up smugglers, sex traffickers, and drug lords on the Mexican side. I was heartened, though, not to emerge from this reading experience with a negative view of the Border Patrol. Theirs is a difficult job. They, too, are human beings. Sure, there are certainly bad eggs, as in any police force. But the ones that Urrea introduces us to seem like people I wouldn't mind knowing. 

As for the Yuma 14: May they rest in peace. And their families not suffer. And I pray that the migrants currently incarcerated are soon, soon, able to find a better life. I do not understand how human can turn against human so easily. Maybe I'm naive. But I think we all deserve a decent shot at life. It doesn't last all that long, after all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's stats for Covid-19: 9,550 confirmed cases (up 789 since Friday, September 11); 553 hospitalizations (up 31); and 67 deaths (up 3). At least deaths don't seem to be rising too fast. But still the cases mount. When will we get a day without any change? Soon?

Book Report: Exit West

 23. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017) (9/11/2020)

NB: I wrote the following after participating in a two-hour Zoom discussion of this book. And so it doesn't feel like my usual "report." But I could be wrong. The discussion was part of a semester-long seminar called "Border Crossings," conducted by University of Houston professor Pete Turchi (and author of one of my favorite books about writing, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer). I am going to do my best to read all nine books on the syllabus. This was the first. So far, I feel the seminar will make me a better reader and writer. I'm pleased to be participating. But from now on, I will write my report before attending the discussion. Before, that is, I get my head blown open by so much perceptive, thoughtful, questioning analysis by my fellow readers.

*     *     *     *     *

This is a book about change and about possibility, one could say. It is about globalization and warfare, flight and safety, displacement and belonging. It is also a love story. In the end, it is about migration, both geographic and temporal, for as the narrator observes, "We are all migrants through time."

Yet although Exit West has a lot of weighty themes, it is a slight book, with fairy tale elements and a sense of spaciousness created by lots of white space, dozens of very short sections, brief asides lifting us out of the central action (a breath of other air), and sentences that go on and on. The occasionally super-long sentences were at times dazzling (but, I confess, at times also a tad annoying), allowing multiple perspectives (if that's the word) on a particular moment to flow together. For example, here the protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, as they are getting to know each other, eat some psychedelic mushrooms:

They spoke quietly under the clouds, glimpsing occasionally a gash of moon or of darkness, and otherwise seeing ripples and churns of city-lit gray. It was all very normal at first, and Saeed wondered if she was perhaps teasing him, or if she had been deceived and sold a dud batch. Soon he had concluded that by some quirk of biology or psychology he was simply, and unfortunately, resistant to whatever it was that mushrooms were supposed to do.
 So he was unprepared for the feeling of awe that came over him, the wonder with which he then regarded his own skin, and the lemon tree in its clay pot on Nadia's terrace, as tall as he was, and rooted in its soil, which was in turn rooted in the clay of the pot, which rested upon the brick of the terrace, which was like the mountaintop of this building, which was growing from the earth itself, and from this earthy mountain the lemon tree was reaching up, up, in a gesture so beautiful that Saeed was filled with love, and reminded of his parents, for whom he suddenly felt such gratitude, and a desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this, and then he regarded Nadio and saw that she was regarding him and her eyes were like worlds.

Okay, that is about a mushroom trip, so of course it's dreamy; but much of the book has that same quality: of wonder and open-heartedness, of worlds not yet discovered. It is also marked by a deep moral center. Despite the fact that the story concerns a period of great unrest and violence—at first in an unspecified place (that could be Pakistan) and time (that could be the present day—there are cell phones), then opening out into other places that Saeed and Nadia, and others, escape to via mysterious "black doors" (among them Mykonos, London, and Marin, California)—there is a sort of sensuous plurality and universality that is embracing, and bracing. I found the book uplifting, optimistic, and as such it is an excellent one to read in these troubled times of hypernationalism.

Here are a few interviews with Hamid about Exit West, the first in the New Yorker, the second in Lithub, the third in UC Berkeley News. And here is a list of essays he has written. I will certainly be reading more of him.

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In the last five days, the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases has climbed to 8,761 (up 322); hospitalizations, to 522 (up 5); and deaths, to 64 (up 6).  Of all the cases, 82 percent remain in the Salinas Valley. Here on the coast, I am generally seeing everyone wearing masks. It is quite a sight. I'm glad to feel relatively safe.

 

Mark Doty, poet

I stumbled on a mention of the following poem in a review of Mark Doty's most recent book, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. Pescadero is a town about 80 miles north of here, on the coast. We've visited it a couple of times. More specifically, we've visited Harley Goat Farms, which I have an inkling inspired this poem. It's delightful. I love goats. (My pre-marriage name is Geissman, meaning goatherd. Nuff said.)

Pescadero

The little goats like my mouth and fingers,

and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board
a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field,

pushes her mouth forward to my mouth,
so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her teeth, and the bristle-whiskers,

and then she kisses me, though I know it doesn’t mean “kiss,”

then leans her head way back, arcing her spine, goat yoga,
all pleasure and greeting and then good-natured indifference: she loves me,

she likes me a lot, she takes interest in me, she doesn’t know me at all
or need to, having thus acknowledged me. Though I am all happiness,

since I have been welcomed by the field’s small envoy, and the splayed hoof,
fragrant with soil, has rested on the fence board beside my hand.

 *

Here's some goats:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The last time I posted Covid-19 statistics was 8/28, eight days ago. Today's numbers are these: 8,439 confirmed cases (up 820 since 8/28); 507 hospitalizations (up 32); deaths 58 (up 3). Maybe we're slowing down? But no end in sight yet.

At least there are dancing goats to remind us that the world is still full of delight.

Stay safe.

Book Report: Desert Notebooks

22. Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020) (9/4/20)

This book begins with a walk in a desert wash, and an owl. It ends much the same way. But in between is a vast exploration of time, of myth, of change, of place, of faith, of history, of life. The owl and deserts, as well as the nature of time, are themes throughout.

I loved this book. It does feel like a writer's notebook, with sometimes very short (two-sentence) sections of description or musing, sometimes longer mini-essays on a larger topic. As such, it constantly changes course, taking the reader in new, and always fascinating directions. There is Lilith of the Bible, the creation tale of the K'iche' Maya, the Ghost Dance, rock art; there is also present-day politics, the climate crisis, Palestine, and Las Vegas. And so much more. It's impossible to summarize, except to say it's a deep meditation on what it is to be alive in the America of today. In that regard, it is not especially optimistic. We are not living in a pretty time. But more than that, it is a meditation on  lived experience, how we interact with the world.

I flagged many, many passages. Here are two as a sampling. The first describes Ehrenreich's perception of time while living in war-torn Ramallah in 2014:

Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.
 I had felt this before in other countries on the verge of collapse. I've felt it since, not quite so acutely but nearly constantly, in the year since the Rhino's [Trump's] election. I don't know what to call it. The time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, the Time of Collapse, Black Hole Time. The days and hours lose their shape, their uniformity, the confidence with which they once marched forth. Time appears to fall apart.

I would say this is even more true of life in the time of Covid-19, which hadn't hit yet when he wrote this book. Though yes, it was bad enough simply with Trump at the helm and things otherwise "as usual."

And here's a bit on the Mesopotamian understanding of the universe, pasted onto the present day:

The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read. Which means there could be no line between the reader and the written. You, who are reading this, you too are written, you too can be read. And I, a writer, am already written through and through. Everything between us, everything that separates us, mountains, stars, years, shimmering thoughts and dreams that die with waking, all of it is a single chain of signs that do not point to another reality, only to this one, all at once.

I could quote more, but as I said: it's difficult to pin this book down. So I'll leave it at that. Like Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, I could definitely see reading this book all over again and finding it just as stimulating. 

I looked at Goodreads to see what people thought, and most people either loved it (*****) or hated it (*), in the latter case because the author, in the very first sentence, calls Trump “the Rhino” (appropriately, if you ask me)—those folks simply objected to the name-calling, never mind what was actually in the book—or else because the book isn’t really about the desert in all its glory. That’s exactly what I liked about it, though: the book is about the desert and so much more, and it’s about our present moment, which is awful in so many ways, and yet time marches, spirals, wings us into an other time, inevitably. This won’t last forever. With any grace from the gods, it won’t last more than two more months. But yes, we’ve made it through awful times before, and we’ll do it again. Even as we keep on changing the planet. And that, too, has happened before, over and over. Nothing new under the sun. But that said, this present moment is in itself something of a miracle. Both at once. Ain't it amazing?