Coronavirus: Day 105
I started reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America for some reason (who recommended this to me??), and it frequently blows my mind. This description of living in a world where an anti-semitic Charles Lindbergh beat FDR and kept America out of WWII hits way too close to home in the current Trump/pandemic/racism moment:
And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning disaster into an epic.
The terror, and the trauma, of the unforeseen is such a perfect way to describe what we've all been living through the last several months.