It’s funny how we talk about events… My mother-in-law, who turns 84 this week, will say “Never have I seen this before in all my 84 years” or “Never have I heard of this before, and I’m 84 years old!” and we’ll laugh and marvel at the marvellous, or sigh and bemoan the unpleasant.
I always feel a little depressed when someone says that history repeats itself… I take issue with the generalization, because I’m halfway to being an accredited historian and historians, you know, talk about nuance, and parse details, and debate causes of things.
This exchange on the most recent episode of Terrible Thanks for Asking, felt heartening. The podcast host, Nora, talked about Covid-19: “And I think back to like, March 2020, how absolutely freaked out the kids were. We're doing all these things for the first time and we believe that there's no precedent. We kept saying “unprecedented times.” And one of the most soothing slash reassuring parts of the book, too, was that nothing is truly unprecedented, even while it is new to us, if that makes sense. Everything's a repeat of a repeat, even when we're like, “I've never seen it before. I've never seen it before.”
To which John Green answered:
“Yeah. And we've never seen it before. And I think that's important to acknowledge. But humanity has seen it before, especially when it comes to infectious disease. And I wanted to write about that, I mean, partly because I'm obsessed with infectious disease, but partly like even before the pandemic. But I wanted to write about infectious disease, in part because I wanted to look at the ways that people have responded to it in the past as a way of understanding how we're responding to it now. How did people respond to cholera in the 19th century? Well, they responded by marginalizing the already marginalized. They responded by blaming outsiders. They responded by getting angry about public health measures and quarantines. But they also responded with extraordinary generosity and real deep, profound solidarity. And seeing both those narratives be able to coexist in history helped me feel like both those narratives can also coexist for me now. Like, I can be upset with the way that we've responded to COVID-19 and the way that the pandemic is much worse than it had to be, while also really celebrating and and feeling the solidarity that people have expressed and the ways that we've understood ourselves to be bound up in each other, even when we're forced to be apart.”
(I love how TTFA offers transcripts of their podcasts!)
It reminds me of this line I read in Claire Messud’s book Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: “It’s all already happened, somewhere, in some way. It’s all there to be retrieved. Each generation is unique, to be sure, as is each individual: and our concatenation of challenges is new in its particular configuration and in its intensity. But if we pause and listen to history and literature, we’ll find, as Louise Glück puts it in “October”, ‘you are not alone, / the poem said / in the dark tunnel.‘”