Three Years Into Covid, We Still Don’t Know How to Talk About It
- Author: Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson
- Full Title: Three Years Into Covid, We Still Don’t Know How to Talk About It
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #nyc #humans
- URL: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/22/magazine/covid-pandemic-oral-history.html
Highlights
- But a city never stops throwing new stimuli at us, engaging our impulse to notice and differentiate. In a city, there’s simply too much newness for a human being to perceive without breaking. The psyche therefore “creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption,” Simmel wrote — a dispassionate crust he called “the blasé attitude.” The blasé attitude, he wrote, is “an indifference toward the distinctions between things. ... The meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless.” (View Highlight)
- The earliest interviews in the archive document this well: A virus wearing down, then finally devouring, the blasé of the most famously blasé people on Earth. (View Highlight)
- This was the spigot turning, the pipe dripping dry, the production of normal shutting off. The experience was painful; it left everyone raw. But the weirdness we’ve felt since — what’s still making us wobbly now — may be the strain of trying, as hard as we can, to crank that busted machinery of normal back on. (View Highlight)
- We made suffering invisible, blocked it out. We buried it in our blasé and carried on. But when the production of normal shut off, so did our machinery for suppressing that vulnerability. There were no norms to contain it. The suffering overflowed (View Highlight)
- Over time, we simply stirred the virus in with all the other forms of disorder and dysfunction we live with — problems that appear to be acceptable because they merely inconvenience some large portion of people, even as they devastate others. (View Highlight)