I’ve always hated winter, and the older I get, the more I dislike it.  Part of the reason is how long it is – much longer than the other seasons.  The Chinese divide winter into two seasons: Early Winter and Late Winter.  And this year, unlike last, we’re having a “real” winter.  Tomorrow the high is supposed to be 19.

     All this is compounded by Covid.  I was exposed by a friend last Monday and I’ve been lying low ever since.  I have no symptoms at all.  The testing sites here are jammed, and therefore quite dangerous, so I’ve opted to wait before I use the one test kit I have.  I’ll do it this Friday, before I have a scheduled massage.  My masseuse asked me to test before I saw her.  New kits should arrive on Saturday.  It’s been very hard to find them anywhere.

     In addition, there’s politics.  I found the anniversary of January 6th very difficult.  As a historian, I have to go back to the War of 1812 to find a similar event — when the British invaded and burned the Capitol to the ground.  The Confederacy never reached Washington, D.C.  The first time Confederate flags were raised in the Capitol was on January 6, 2021.

     But I’m very glad Biden finally spoke out.  His speech, where he continually referred to “the former president” but never used his name, was excellent.  I especially liked when he said, “He’s not just a former president, he’s a former defeated president.”  However, it continues to be shocking that almost every Republican in Congress, regardless of how they themselves were menaced, continues to downplay the event and support Trump.  Hopefully this will change.  The rate of people getting, and dying from Covid is far higher in Republican districts than in Democratic ones.  The Republicans’ platform now consists of opposing vaccinations, opposing voting, and opposing women.

     I believe this is a losing strategy.  People have voted under even more arduous conditions than those the Republican states are creating.  I hope that the Supreme Court will not overturn Roe v. Wade.  In addition to stare decisus (the principle that the court not reverse long-established policies), Chief Justice Roberts cares that he has a good reputation.  He does not want to preside over a court that makes political rather than juridical decisions.  Let’s hope his view prevails.

     Also, this outbreak of Covid may decline as rapidly as it arose.  It did that in South Africa, which does have a much younger population.  But we can hope that it will diminish within a month or so here. 

     Finally, with regard to Covid, politics, and the weather, remember the end of the quotation with which I started this piece.  Shelley wrote, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind.”

I host two celebrations: Thanksgiving and a New Year’s Day Open House.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday – my shorthand for it is “great food and no presents.”  I took the occasion of my divorce, back in 1976, to celebrate it with friends rather than family and have done so ever since.  Last year I couldn’t have it because of Covid, but this year I did.  Seven friends attended.  I do the turkey, stuffing, and gravy; they bring everything else.  It was sparked by my 86-year-old former colleague and role model, Renate, who asked me if I was doing Thanksgiving this year.  I said, “Will you come?”  “Of course,” she answered, even though she lives on the far Upper West side of Manhattan and I’m in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  It was a lovely occasion.

     Recently, with the arrival of the Delta and Omicron variants of Covid, I cancelled my New Year’s Day Open House for this year.  Everyone who wrote me agreed that I’d done the right thing, even though they were disappointed.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to celebrate together next year.

     This mixture of joy and sorrow defines the human condition.  Twenty years ago, after 9/11, I was teaching history at Brooklyn College.  9/11 was a Tuesday, the college was closed Wednesday, and classes resumed on Thursday.  In my two morning classes, we discussed what had happened.  My third course, Tudor-Stuart England, met after lunch.  When I asked the students if they wanted to talk about what happened, they answered “No, we’ve been talking about it all morning.”  Then they said, “Take us back to the past.”  Since it was only September, we were still in the 1400s.  I replied, “Where there was only the Black Plague (which killed one-third of Europe’s population) to worry about.”  Tragedy and hope prevailed then and still do now.  So here’s hoping that next year will be better and we’ll have a happier New Year, even knowing that then there will be other things to worry about.

     In his dystopic story of 1909, The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster describes a room of the future.  “Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her.

There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing.  There was the hot-bath button…there was the cold-bath button.  There was the button that produced literature.  And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends.  The room, although it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”

Although he did not predict computers, Forster portrayed how we now live during the Covid pandemic.  To Forster, the way of life he described was decadent and curtailed; to us, it is a fairly successful adaption to unfortunate circumstances.  In Forster’s story, the hero must destroy this method of living and bring humanity back to “normal.”  But what about us?

     People now talk about a “new normal” after the pandemic.  I have found hope in the work of the Italian historian Gianna Pomata.  She wrote about the impact of the bubonic plague on Renaissance Europe.  (I learned about her from Lawrence Wright’s article in last summer’s New Yorker.)  Pomata argued that after the Black Plague, “nothing was the same.”  Instead of dwelling on the tragedy of destruction, she focused on renewal: “Because of the danger, there’s this wonderful human response, which is to think in a new way.”  Pomata then discussed the rise of both capitalism (instead of the medieval guild system) and democracy (instead of monarchy and aristocracy).

         Regardless of opinions about capitalism, I remain basically optimistic.  I don’t think we know yet what our positive reactions to Covid will be.  But I do believe they will occur and that we too will find creative solutions to our situation.  May it come soon.