It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah’s knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths’
What to make of the world we find ourselves in? In the last note, I was considering how we collectively understand the trajectory of the pandemic, and the difficulty of ascribing meanings to what has unfolded. Part of the challenge is the odd combination of a broadly shared condition - the ‘pan’ in pandemic - with a huge range of experiences and outcomes. We have very much entered the realm of Borgesian labyrinths and gardens, of forking paths and infinite worlds.
The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
That, indeed, is the problem. I reached a similar conclusion to Blanchot when working on the Fukushima nuclear accident, a profound realisation of what was lost when the triple disasters hit Japan. On that day, certain paths opened, and many others closed forever, lines drawn that would become walls. I considered this in one of the first notes I published here:
The unavoidable but unspoken truth was evident to anyone who cared to look: the Fukushima that existed on the morning of 11 March 2011 was gone. It was no more. And most importantly, it was not possible to bring back. It was gone forever.
Recently it dawned on me that a parallel conclusion can be made with the world that existed until 23 January 2020. This is perhaps the most appropriate place to date the start of the pandemic, as it is when Wuhan first went into lockdown. Not only is this where the virus originally appeared, it is also where it was met by that extreme emergency response, one subsequently replicated across much of the globe. Soon, emergency responses became the default, with different path dependencies replicating across respective communities. What followed has been a proliferation of timelines and experiences reminiscent of Borges’ stories, only without his charm.
With many of pandemic restrictions now gone, eased or being lifted, it is easy to feel that we are returning to our old lives and ways of living. Yet the ‘re-’ is misleading, there is no recovery, no rebuilding, no return to what was before.
The unavoidable but unspoken truth is evident to anyone who cares to look: the world that existed until 23 January 2020 is gone. It is no more. And most importantly, it is not possible to bring back. It is gone forever.
This framing is not meant to be evaluative, it is to suggest a threshold was crossed. It is possible to clearly demarcate a ‘before’ from an ‘after’. Reflecting on the first year of the pandemic, I turned to this quote from Hannah Arendt:
For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past.
I’m more confident in suggesting that the line drawn in January 2020 has become a wall, we have stumbled on and are now irretrievably shut off from what had existed there. Previously, I had hoped of finding normality, now I recognise it is as a siren song. Insofar as there is any kind of ‘new normal’, it is one in which all these different pathways and timelines uneasily jostle together.
After the ‘after’, a world out of sync, a proliferation of experiences and interpretations of what has happened. What began as something relatively simultaneous - the world going into shutdown - has become more fragmented and splintered. This is effectively fractal: zoom in, zoom out, one can find similar dynamics. That the pandemic happened to all of us gives the false impression that we experienced the same thing. We did not. Different paths have been taken. That everything remains intact conceals these divergences. All of this has important ramifications for where we are now, and what might come next.
The line grown into the wall, that world gone forever. It strikes me that this observation is both banal and profound, it entails seriously reckoning with what was lost, but also - perhaps - with finding new pathways amidst the ruins.