But this brand of angst isn’t new, for parents of small children. (It was about a year ago, long before Covid, when my husband and I started to jokingly refer to people without children as billionaires of time.) Rather, the feeling is an intensification of existing tendencies, born from the rigors of the moment. Because that, it turns out, is one thing that lockdown does: it intensifies and exaggerates the realities of private lives. Whatever the brute facts of your domestic setup were before the pandemic hit, their power to determine your day-to-day reality has grown. If you lived alone, you are now physically alone all the time. If you were a caretaker, you’re caretaking constantly. If you had a partner, I hope you’re compatible, because you are now that person’s only flesh-and-blood social outlet. Whatever made your home life pleasing or challenging before is magnified, since most of the ways you created space between yourself and that life are unavailable now, or available in only an ersatz or diminished form.
Lockdown has made me aware of something I barely noticed before: the many opportunities that my old life provided for escape. More specifically, the almost gracious way that society was set up to allow me, and many others, to slip from one role into another and another as the day rolled by. This flow strikes me as distinctively modern. And it is gone now, temporarily. The heterogenous, compartmentalized life of before is replaced with a life where your Main Thing is now your Only Thing. At moments it’s fascinating to live this way, but there’s also a sting. It’s the sting of being unable to take turns carrying each other’s burdens. That’s an irony of mass quarantine. We’ve entered into lockdown together. And yet, this act of collectivism has temporarily thrown us back on ourselves, deeper than ever into our own redoubts. To help each other survive, we’ve made it impossible to give or receive so many other, more familiar kinds of help.
It’s a truism that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. But it’s much rarer to see an explanation of exactly how history might help us build a better future. This doesn’t stop historians such as Yuval Noah Harari advising world leaders at Davos, or scientists such as Jared Diamond writing bestsellers about the collapse of traditional societies, of course. But the mechanisms that might enable knowledge of the past to change actions in the present are rarely clear, and historians who take big history to a wider readership, distilling the many voices of humanity’s past into a single human story, often become targets, as the recent New Yorker profile of Harari – which accused him, among other things, of ‘assured generalisation’ – demonstrated. Does the problem lie in the act of storytelling itself? If big data could enable us to turn big history into mathematics rather than narratives, would that make it easier to operationalise our past? Some scientists certainly think so.
In the vast departure hall of Shanghai’s decade-old Hongqiao Railway Station, an epic writ in 80,000 tons of steel, everything looks new and tired at once, tinged with gray — even the October sunshine that filters down from skylights so high it can’t quite reach the floor. This is architecture meant to set the soul asoar, but I am conscious only of how far I am below, in the horde at the gates. Down the stairs, the bullet train waits, sleek-nosed and sealed in on itself, like a missile. A stoic janitor steers a Zamboni-like machine down the platform, buffing it to a gleam. When the train sets off, it feels like nothing: the slight give of a door unlatched. If I don’t look out the window, I can imagine myself absolutely still.
The Chinese government started laying intercity high-speed track in 2005, and today, its network is the longest and most heavily relied upon of any nation’s. Six hours are enough to devour the over 900 miles from Shanghai to Xi’an, the landlocked capital of Shaanxi Province in China’s central northwest, standing on the bones of the imperial city of Chang’an. In the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., this was the center of not only China but the globe — the eastern origin of the trade routes we call the Silk Road and the nexus of a cross-cultural traffic in ideas, technology, art and food that altered the course of history as decisively as the Columbian Exchange eight centuries later. A million people lived within Chang’an’s pounded-earth walls, including travelers and traders from Central, Southeast, South and Northeast Asia and followers of Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism. All the while, Shanghai was a mere fishing village, the jittery megapolis of the future not yet a ripple on the face of time.
Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the “well-crafted, writing-class story,” that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings. Some readers may no longer admire this kind of story. But I still love it. What is craft, after all, but a good thing well made?
In dark times, people crave comfort. In scuzzy and dystopic times, people reach beyond themselves, and create something that might comfort generations.
At least that’s the portrait David Kamp paints in “Sunny Days,” a lively and bewitching recounting of a particularly ripe period in television and cultural history, from the creation of “Sesame Street” to “Free to Be … You and Me.” From 1969 through the late 1970s, our notion of how to communicate with young children was upended, forever. In fact, childhood itself was radicalized in what Kamp calls “the children’s-liberation movement” — an outgrowth of civil rights foment and progressive ideals that dared to take children’s interior lives seriously. Mostly via puppets.
As if in unwitting aid of the malady they address, books about insomnia tend to be very dull indeed. Many are stuffed with statistics and unhelpful suggestions, like one of those oversize polyester-plumped sham pillows you see on the fancier beds — and just as likely to be flung in frustration to the floor. Samantha Harvey’s memoir of sleeplessness is more like a small and well-worn eiderdown quilt: It might not cover everything, but it both cools and warms, lofts and lulls, settling gradually on its inhabitant with an ethereal solidity.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.