From dust we've come
Living through coronavirus has been a really weird experience for all of us. Some of us are frightened about losing our jobs. Others are scared of losing their lives, or their loved ones. It’s terrifying.
During this time, I’ve read and listened to a few things that have helped to shift my mind away from despair. While the excerpts below are all from different places, they’ve swirled around in my brain and combined into something that’s helped me contextualise the current moment in something larger. I hope they might help you, too.
Every day, I read a few diary entries from Londoners throughout history in A London Year. Thomas Hearne’s diary from 1712 describes a group of people called ‘mohocks’ who made a habit of nightly riots where they abused anyone in their path:
There are great numbers of them, and their custom is to make themselves drunk, and in the night-time go about the streets in great droves, and to abuse, after a most inhumane manner, all persons they meet, by beating down their noses, pricking on the fleshy parts of their bodys with their swords, not sparing even the women whom they usually set upon their Heads and commit such Indecencies towards them as are not to be mentioned…
Obviously, this wasn’t happening all the time. But after spending the past few months reading different diary excerpts from the past, it’s reminded me that times were often a lot harder and there were some pretty barbaric things going on. For the most part, life’s a lot safer today – even if there’s still a fair bit of sword (well, knife) carrying.
I’m also working through The Daily Stoic this year. Each day has a different quote from a stoic philosopher, and some of them are particularly profound. Like this one from Marcus Aurelius:
Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.
This moment in time is barely a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of the universe. 2020 will be hard and we may even lose people that we love. But we’ll get through it, and humanity will recover. Or, as the Persian adage says, ‘this too shall pass’.
Ken Liu explores themes of life, love and the universe in his collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. When I feel like I’m drowning in statistics about rising coronavirus deaths, his beautiful prose whisks me away to a place where the world seems bigger and more expansive, mysterious and beautiful:
At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.
At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.
The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.
As Austin Kleon writes, not everything will be okay (but some things will).
Maybe The Brilliance sang it best in Dust We Are and Shall Return:
From dust we’ve come and
Dust we are and shall return
Be still my soul and let it go
Just let it go