Household Opera

All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

This is going to be a fragmentary post because my thinking on it is still disconnected. Sometimes I get thoughts and words stuck in my head and blog to get them out; if I'm lucky, the fragments amount to more than self-indulgent navel-gazing, and make sense to someone else reading them. (In other words: Probable navel-gazing ahead. You've been warned.)

I've been thinking about loneliness a lot lately. Not long ago I realized that my joy in all things aesthetic depends on my being able to experience them with other people who also care about them. For better or worse, I've always bonded most closely with people when we can talk about books or art or music or theater or film, and lately I've really been missing that. The great thing about my trip this summer was the superabundance of both beauty — landscape, art museums, architecture, Mozart masses, amazing city streets — and good friends, and the elusive sense of being completely at ease in said friends' company. But it also reminded me of what's been absent from my everyday life.

I think of that 2006 study that suggested that Americans have fewer confidants than they used to. The findings have been disputed somewhat. But it rang true when I first read about it, and it rings even truer now.

(Several people have told me recently that New Englanders aren't all that friendly. Neighbors don't know each other, they say; it's hard to form deep friendships. I hope that's not true; but, though I've made a few friends since I moved here, there's nothing like the network I had in grad school, or even my smaller circle of friends in Philadelphia. My closest friends all live at least a hundred miles away.)

It's hard to separate all this from the general malaise of right now: the worry about whether we're ever going to pull out of this recession, the grim collective mood, the outbursts of panic-fueled bigotry, the lines from Yeats's "The Second Coming" popping unbidden into my head at odd intervals. Laura at Apt. 11D posted a particularly vivid account of this state of mind: anger combined with the increasing awareness of social networks fraying, and then fraying some more.

I want to do something to improve the lot of all us lonely people (cue "Eleanor Rigby"), even though I know, realistically, one person can't do very much. But that's part of the problem. I'm feeling rather acutely like just one person at the moment. How many other people out there are feeling like just one person in a world of acquaintances and strangers, I wonder?

And what is one to do?

At any rate, if you've read this far, Reader, thank you for listening.

The return of the pastoral

Interesting:

• Michael Pollan, in Sunday's New York Times, writes an open letter to the next president about the need for a complete overhaul of our farming and food system. (It's long, but it's well worth reading.)
• There's a petition for an organic farm to be planted on the South Lawn of the White House (a gesture Pollan also endorses).
• Colleges have begun teaching about agriculture and "ecogastronomy."
• There's apparently a movement afoot to revive the World War II-era "victory garden" in the age of climate change, fuel scarcity, and food shortages.

I'm of two minds about all of this. Part of me sees the emphasis on a renewal of localized, traditional agriculture in the light of 2000-plus years of the pastoral poetry tradition. And there is a nostalgia for an idealized rural past behind a lot of the discourse about local food: not a past where preternaturally literate shepherds piped on oaten straws, but a pre-factory-farming past, when people knew where their food came from, when oranges and bananas were a luxury if you didn't live in a tropical climate, when families sat down to dinner together, and so on.

But the other side of me, the side that loves farmers' markets and fully expects that we'll be in for a nasty shock when oil supplies really start to run low, is deeply interested in learning how to grow my own food, especially with the economy circling the drain. That same side of me is weighing the options for doing some container herb and vegetable gardening on the little deck outside my apartment next year, and wondering if anyone else in New London is interested in getting a community garden going. I suspect part of it is a sign of wanting to learn more practical skills in the face of doom and gloom. Call it a victory garden or call it an apotropaic gesture; I just want to do something tangible to deal with the free-floating anxiety, even if it's only planting some tomatoes. (And green onions! And salad greens! And rosemary! Of course, this also has something to do with my preexisting fondness for produce.)

Waiting for New Year's Day

It's hard to describe how I've been feeling lately without using words like "apocalyptic," or at the very least "gloom" and "doom" in some combination. It's not just the economic meltdown, or the particular brand of craziness that the election brings to the mix. It's something more generalized. It was startling today, for instance, to come across this post at Ferule and Fescue after I'd been thinking more or less the exact same thing. Like Flavia, I've had the feeling before, but it's gotten worse of late. I can't tell how much of the apocalyptic mood has to do with current events and how much of it is exacerbated by my having just uprooted myself and moved to a new place. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling the malaise.

I've been thinking of the panic over the Y2K bug, another point when people (some people, anyway) thought the End of the World was at hand. I remember eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Ann Arbor in 1999 while two men opposite talked earnestly about stockpiling bottled water and canned goods. I remember spending that New Year's Eve with my friend R. in New York, winding up in an obscure little bar on the Lower East Side and clinking our ritual New Year's Eve champagne glasses when the world didn't dissolve into anarchy as midnight. I remember how hazy and sunny and relaxed the city felt when we went out in search of bagels and lox the next morning. (It was a warmer-than-usual first day of January, back before I automatically associated weather like that with global warming.)

And I think probably the same thing will happen again, the worst fears unrealized for now, doomsday deferred again. The only thing is, there's no definite end date to the malaise, no New Year's Day to mark the point where we know the apocalypse won't happen this time. Nor is any of this likely to turn out to be nothing after all.

How about the rest of you? It's not just me, right? Anyone found a way to fend off the apocalyptic willies?

Vaguely disturbing

Seen at the grocery store this afternoon: a toddler wheeling a child-sized grocery cart. That wasn't the disturbing part; the kid and the cart were kind of adorable. What gave me pause was a little banner attached to the cart, right at eye level, which read "Customer in training." Because we all need to be reminded that our ultimate purpose in life is to buy stuff.

On a somewhat more cheerful note...

According to Making Light, the Society for Creative Anachronism is organizing its own relief efforts. As one commenter puts it, "We are weirdo geeks, but we are very skilled resourceful geeks." Blessed are the geeks.

This too shall pass. I hope.

Rana puts her finger on the jittery anxiety that's been in the air this week. It's not just Hurricane Katrina, the unnerving reports about bird flu, the price of gas and the thought of how people are going to cope with it, the surreality of most of the news out of Washington; it's everything all at once.

When I remind myself that things were demonstrably much worse in, e.g., the fourteenth century, and that people are always predicting the end of civilization as we know it, and that the apocalypse has never yet shown up when predicted, and that any historian worth his or her salt can tell you that things have always gone badly and people have always muddled through somehow — that's reassuring, sort of. I think of how everyone freaked out over Y2K, and how I spent New Year's Eve 1999 with my friend in New York, and how we were sitting in a bar when midnight struck, the power didn't go out, planes didn't fall from the sky, and the world didn't plunge into chaos. I remind myself that it's probably human nature to panic and, in the process, to seek out other panicky people and panic some more.

And yet: that disaster that didn't happen was just a potential disaster. It didn't actually wreck the Gulf Coast, kill poultry in Asia, make the cost of fuel go through the roof, or leave the poor behind to drown.

I fear for us all, sometimes. There seems like so little that any one person can do, though there are always ways to help. Right now I'm concentrating on remembering the way my dad used to say "This too shall pass."