Three years after Covid, we still don't know how to talk about it

 "Mars is so blurry."

"I have so many dry goods. I'm so desperate for a mango.

 "Rock our pots and pans at 7:00 p.m."

 "No one can be in their right mind right now."

 "We've gone into prayer mode."

 "From their outside view, like, New York is on fire."

New York's Chinatown in March 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic lockdown.

What happened to us

Most Americans think they know the history of the pandemic. But when I dove into a Covid oral history project, I realized how much we were still missing.

Notice your resistance to reading the next thousand words. They are about looking back on the pandemic with intelligence and care, while recognizing that the pandemic is still with us. They raise the possibility that when we say the pandemic is over, we are actually seeking permission to act as if it never happened – to free ourselves from having to make sense of it or take it seriously. its continuing effects. As we enter a fourth pandemic year, each of us consciously or unconsciously works through potentially irreconcilable stories about what we've been through — or else, vigorously avoiding this dissonance, insisting that there is no work to do. And so, with many people claiming (at least publicly) that they've overcome the pandemic - that they've, so to speak, straightened out all their picture frames and dragged their psychic trash to the curb - this article says: em >Hey, wait. What's in that bag?

A great place to start digging, if you're still with me: The NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, created at Columbia University in March 2020. A few weeks after the first confirmed case of Covid in New York, an impromptu collective of sociologists and oral historians met virtually and began interviewing, over Zoom, approximately 200 New Yorkers to document their individual experiences of the pandemic as it unfolded. unfolded. People spoke to investigators for hours about what they saw, did and felt and what they feared or expected to happen next. The researchers spoke to these same people again several months later, and again after that, conducting three waves of pandemic life interviews from spring 2020 to fall 2022. During this time, unintelligible experiences became more intelligible. or remained defiantly unintelligible. Pandemic angst has intensified and blunted. Meanwhile, time itself has smeared.

The archives, which will eventually be made public by Columbia, are full of revelations, anecdotes, anxieties, blind spots, big ideas and bizarre ideas. A father of two in the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood of the Bronx predicts, in April 2020, the final end of the custom of shaking hands (“It just seems like a really stupid thing to do – and unnecessary”) and suspects that everything will start to get back to normal by the end of May. Another father-of-two, still adrift in the pandemic doldrums nine months later, hears his 11-year-old daughter screaming, “I want homework! and realizes how desperate she has become for the structure. People working in hospitals report feeling threatened by constant auditory stimulation - the beeps, alarms, airway calls...