And that dissonance – as though no time has passed – I’m finding extremely difficult. It also means we are dealing with and returning to issues that concerned our friendships last March. Because I have been absent from the city basically since the pandemic began, and because all my friends are here, seeing some of them again has felt like taking up where we left off last March. The problem, perhaps, is that it’s difficult to feel as though time has passed. So much of that book is about time – about the way our experiences are dictated by the variations in our perceptions of time (ie, “What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony-uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death.”) It has been nice to walk around spring-time Berlin thinking about these things, but much stranger this week, being back in Brooklyn, walking through familiar streets and thinking about time. But I couldn't get through the translation he has, and so I am listening to the version of the translation I own (in the storage unit). I had read about a third of the book a few years ago, during a blizzard in 2017.
It’s a lot, to leave the curfew-ridden, disease-plagued city I’ve been living in, and arrive back here, the city I’ve lived most of my adult life.įor most of the last month I’ve been going on long walks listening to an excellent audio-book version of The Magic Mountain. Where people aren’t even wearing masks, not necessarily because they’re jerks, but because the CDC says you no longer have to. Where you can go into a bar and drink inside. A place where people hug, gather not just in groups of five, but in tens and thirties. But I have been thinking about it a lot, this last week, because I am in New York.Īrriving back in New York is like arriving into a different version of reality. I know that this is not a profound or original statement, so I won’t harp on it. The last year has done weird things to time.
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