Pass over us
It feels kind of like ancient history to be talking about the recent (western) Easter and Passover holidays, even though I guess it was just over a week ago. But we were able to participate in two Zoom-mediated seders this year thanks to kind invitations from inclusive Jewish friends, and not only did we get to see many faces we miss seeing a lot, I also found myself thinking so much about the significance of the words we spoke. About freedom and bondage, rescue and being spared, about never, ever going back and taking the memory as a cue to advocate for the freedom of others. It seemed unusually relevant and meaningful right now. (Plus you wash your hands a lot as part of the ritual.)
Speaking of ritual, this article in the New York Times, which surveys scientists about some things people seem worried about regarding living in our time — washing your groceries, safety in going outside — should be helpful to many:
Studies show that some small viral particles could float in the air for about half an hour, but they don’t swarm like gnats and are unlikely to collide with your clothes. “A droplet that is small enough to float in air for a while also is unlikely to deposit on clothing because of aerodynamics,” said Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech. “The droplets are small enough that they’ll move in the air around your body and clothing.”
Helen Shaw in Vulture on the revival of the show Buyer & Cellar (which I have not seen) as streaming theater, and how it serves as a proof-of-concept for this sort of theater in this do-the-best-we-can time:
Something else I learned from Buyer & Cellar: We don’t always know which plays are the serious ones. I had thought that the show’s original outing was a French macaron: Ridiculous and sweet, it didn’t linger on the palate. When I was making my list of productions of the 2010s that steered my thinking, I waved to it but didn’t stop. Yet wrap the pandemic around something, and it changes. Performed to an audience isolated and in fear, Buyer & Cellar sounds deeper notes — ones that have always been in the text, but that I hadn’t heard. You know, I think we might have many such comedies. Certainly we have many such viewers, leaning closer to hear them. Now is their time.
In case you missed it, people seemed to really find this interview I did with media theorist (and my MA advisor) Tom de Zengotita on the feeling of living through the pandemic immensely helpful:
The impossible search for an adequate metaphor. Earthquakes, wars — I mean, the effects of an earthquake are vastly more severe and disruptive and horrible, just horrible. A real disaster is just horrible. But it’s … there. You can take a picture of it. In this case, you can take a picture of a doctor, or a corpse, or a microscopic picture of the little virus. You can take a lot of pictures. But none of those pictures feel like they’re pictures of it. There will never be an adequate metaphor.
Lauren Winner in the Washington Post on a closed-down Easter Sunday as both something with plenty of historical precedent and a “felix culpa”:
The teaching of felix culpa is lodged in the classic Easter prayer known as the exsultet, and it includes the idea that even tragic situations can and do give rise to good things that otherwise would not have come about. It’s a difficult teaching because, if misapprehended, it can seem to evade lament. But the concept of felix culpa doesn’t mean to interfere with mourning. It shows us that, in grievous situations, there is not only grief — there are also good things that would not have come about without the circumstances we grieve.
And finally, I read Muriel Spark’s novella The Girls of Slender Means last weekend at the suggestion of my aforementioned friend Lauren (who picked it at random to read and chat about on the phone) and we both quite liked it. And it’s short. We hadn’t realized how relevant it would seem.