The erosion of everyday life as we have never imagined it before. We can see potential death all around us, as we do the most normal things we know how to do. Breathing. Touching. Learning to talk with a 6-foot distance between us, “Two shopping carts long,” the nearby grocery store says as we wait in line a block long that tails around the corner, like a giant snake moving with punctuated emptiness. How do we learn to see around us during these strange times of topsy-turvyness? To see what is actually important and what is not, and to hold on fiercely to that knowledge after this is all over.

In these strange moments of deep collective silences, we are caught, frozen, able to enact only a fraction of our more normal movements. Our old lives stand in our stilled memories, like old dreams, filled and overflowing with bygone images of travel, by car, by bus, by subway, by airplane. We used to be filled with sociality in each other’s presence in bodily form, shaking hands, hugging, kissing each other’s cheek, touching.

We are getting more and more comfortable with the idea of living with the certainty of uncertainty. In a way that is the climate problem. Most of us could not live with this uncertainty before the coming of this virus. Now we are living every single day with the unknown. We can see in our mind’s eye the presence of the germ. We can imagine it even if we cannot see it. We cannot catch in one image the climate problem. That situation is its very challenge. Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable brilliantly tackles this uncertainty as rooted in our very incapacity to imagine climate crisis as a whole phenomenon. In contrast, the virus is much easier to imagine than climate, and we can see in our mind’s eye it coming after us.

In another evocative book that speaks to this moment, Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams plays with the very concept of erosion. The Grand Canyon’s beautiful erosion is contrasted with the parallel erosions of democracy over the past forty years. The beauty in the natural process of geologic time frames the daily erosions we experience every single day.

Perhaps the peephole we have just slipped through, though full of hardship of different degrees for billions of us, will give us a collective glimpse of how to move forward towards everyone’s survival, as for the very first time all around the world all at the same time, we can see that another person’s illness can make us die and vice versa. The necessity of moving forward together is becoming more and more critical as each day passes. I am hoping we can remember that. I am hoping I can remember that, too.

Here is the link to the interview I did of Terry Tempest Williams, around her new book, Erosion, in mid-October for the Bay Area Book Festival Women Lit Series on October 17, 2020 in Berkeley, CA: