Persevere - Issue #17
Persevere - Issue #17
I'm tired. Are you tired too? The end is in sight, but hope is hard.
Welcome to Issue #17. Fitz has a short personal narrative this week that perhaps some of you can relate to. We have a lot of good stuff in the pipeline for the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, as always, thank you to all those who have shared the newsletter. We like to think that we’re building a rare kind of community here, and we’re so grateful that you’re here.
My computer tells me that this is the fourth blank document I’ve opened this morning. Microsoft Word helpfully titled it “Document4.” It’s the fourth blank document I’ve opened because I keep starting different versions of this week’s newsletter, and each time, I think, maybe this will be the one that will stick.
I’m tired today. I think I’m a little sad too. I received an email from a student earlier telling me that she’d been informed by Health Services on campus that she was a close contact with someone who tested positive for Covid. She has to quarantine for 10 days. She’ll go from being a body in the classroom to a face on the screen. It’s okay. I’m rolling with it. We all are.
But I’m tired. I realize that, in this past week especially, I have settled on a new kind of acceptance. Maybe I’m late. Maybe I should’ve arrived here months ago. But, when I had the opportunity to give a talk this past week as part of a faculty lecture series, it didn’t occur to me, until Steph asked about it after, to consider how much better it would’ve been to give the talk in person. In the week leading up to it, as I prepared my slides and wrote my notes, I guess I had just accepted that lectures happen on Zoom now.
Then, I got word that I’ve had a paper accepted to a conference—it’s my favorite conference, an international association comprised of people with similar scholarly interests as me and past conferences have taken me to Nova Scotia and Vienna. This year, the conference is in Copenhagen. It never even occurred to me that I’d get to go there. Conferences are all on Zoom now.
There’s a relationship here, I think, between acceptance and exhaustion. When I had hope, I had energy. Somehow the hope has slipped and tiredness has crept in. I know there are reasons to be hopeful. I love hearing from students and neighbors and friends who have received the vaccine. The end is in sight. Spring is coming. But hope is hard in the moment and the effort to sustain it sometimes feels laborious.
Once, a long time ago, when Steph and I were living for several months in Nairobi, we took a bus trip from the city to the coast, a 10-hour overnight journey. I did a lot of research and vetted the bus companies for safety and, importantly, for air conditioning. When the day of the trip arrived, it was swelteringly hot. Boarding the bus felt like parting a scrim. We found our seats and settled in, assured that when the bus finally started, the air conditioner would kick in, and we would be relieved.
But then, when the bus’s engines revved up and we pulled out, the air conditioner didn’t come on. When the conductor came around to check tickets, I asked when they’d turn on the air. “It’s broken,” he told me.
In what I now recognize as not one of my better moments, I raised my voice, “Well, what are we supposed to do?”
He took my ticket, ripped it, and smiled as he said, simply, “Persevere.”
Some Sounds to Listen To…
Fitz: I love bands with long names (see: A Winged Victory for the Sullen), but this band has really outdone themselves. I present, The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. I’ve been really loving their 2015 album, Harmlessness. Check it out!
Jason: I basically cycle through long phases of listening to three different genres — indie folk and alt-country type stuff, various subgenres of metal (including ambient metal, an oxymoronic-sounding concept if there ever was one), and east coast-style hip-hop. When I’m immersed in the first of these three genres, a good 60% of my playlist is usually Gregory Alan Isakov. This song is just, like, perfect.
Some Words to Read…
Fitz: This past week, because we desperately needed to get out of the house while still remaining socially distanced, we took the kids to Concord with only a vague sense of what we wanted to do there. What we did was got some delicious sandwiches, listened to stories from WBUR’s “Circle Round,” and visited the North Bridge, where the Minutemen held off the British forces, and the Old Manse, home to Ralph Waldo Emerson. So, in honor of that trip and me remembering that Emerson’s essays were among my earliest inspirations, I wanted to share this archive of his writing: https://www.rwe.org
Jason: Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection Everything that Rises Must Converge. I’ve read A Good Man is Hard to Find a bazillion times, because I teach two stories from it, and sometimes I forget how good this one is too. Her story “The Lame Shall Enter First,” especially. Also, a bluntly-titled essay that was recently published as an English translation, and that has gotten quite a bit of press lately. Her points are provocative, but also far more sensible and measured than the title might suggest. I recommend it. And if the title makes you uncomfortable, well, then I recommend it twice as strongly.
Thank you, as always, for reading.