No6: DEAR WORLD: A FEW QUESTIONS
PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH
KATHY FANG
It has become the natural state of life to be possessed by an eternal stream of questions. Is there a cure for the coronavirus yet? When will my groceries arrive? Will we be able to go back to school in the fall? Is it safe to wipe down spinach leaves with disinfectant? How many face masks am I allowed to buy? Will my pet fish contract the virus if I forgot to sanitize its pellets? When will everything be normal again? Wait—what day is it, again?
In the past four months, the American illusion fell apart. What was once seen as individualism is now viewed as selfishness. What was once celebrated as freedom without bounds is now curbed as nothing more than uninformed carelessness. The core values of Americanism, of post-Enlightenment Western culture at large, failed the test of ecological practicality. We are back at square one: alienated from a world we thought we conquered, stuck at home with our questions and broken beliefs, in search of answers that do not exist.
I look in the news to start, sifting through a daily flood of articles and briefs and numbers, picking up fragments of the truth. June. Shelter-in-place. Possible cure. One million. Ventilator. Online fall semester. 6 feet. More than.
No conclusive research. Or worse yet — inconclusive research. What does that even mean?
Nothing shakes us more than a contradictory fact. I move on. I learn from my mother that it suffices to soak the leaves in water, scrub, and soak again. Knowing this comforts me, and I vigorously wash my greens. What about the fruits?
I learn that entire swaths of the nation are rising up and protesting the pandemic—well, the shelter-in-place orders. Locked in my room in my house, I read story after story about crowded beaches in Florida, marches through downtown Denver, and busy hair salons in Georgia, aghast. Did I miss something? Was the pandemic over while I was asleep? How could so many people ignore fear, ignore science, ignore death?
The questions multiply, and the pedestal upon which our cultural values rest crumbles. Our nation couldn’t even agree on the question of a pandemic’s immediate urgency, or the fact that injecting disinfectants, in fact, is a scientifically proven bad idea—how could we ever take on the big questions of liberty and equality? The road lies long ahead.
I watch a YouTube video explaining the art of making cloth face masks, and I wonder if the craft store is still open. With Georgia fresh in my memory, I decide against it and cut up an old T-shirt instead. Will I regret it? Is T-shirt fabric even good enough?
Lately, I’ve become more and more drawn to postmodernist literary theory. A newly self- proclaimed convert of Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, and Don DeLillo, I turn to them for answers and guidance in a time that they prophesied in their works. Naturally, being postmodernists, they only offer more questions in response. Where is God? How do we achieve true happiness without knowing anything? Why are humans afraid of death? What are we waiting for?
It seems like the world is holding its breath in waiting. In waiting for what?
As much as my seventeen-year-old understanding of the world could comprehend, the road ahead is beyond imagination, beyond expectation and anticipation alike. We try to hold onto some semblance of stability, but everything, sooner or later, gives way. We cower from present, past, and future while taunting reality with the myth of exceptionalism—a myth that is little more than a tattered silk scarf, incapable of protecting even the most ardent, insistent believers from the bitter cold of scientific fact. We are no longer sure of our place on the biological food chain, let alone our place in the world, and we stay at home instead, haunted by unfathomable numbers and red blotches on a map that was once so familiar. Is a virus really more powerful than the American nation? How can we be sure?
As far as we know, no aquatic animals have contracted the COVID-19 virus yet. But what about the cat?
It’s difficult to write or to create or to do anything with so little certainty. Every word feels dangerous, as if it could be contradicted or disproved or deemed irrelevant in the uncertain minutes to follow. Time is being recreated by the second, and no S&P 500 graph or executive order can predict the next month, let alone the future. We simply don’t know, and that’s the hardest part of being human. But everything has got to work out eventually, right?
My life as a high school senior has devolved into an endless series of questions. At a time when I should be celebrating the end of one chapter and deciding the course of the next, I am stuck in between these two certainties, suddenly without a foothold or a stepping stone to cross. This is surely the feeling that inspired the phrase “in limbo”— caught in the unknown between knowns, a crack in our grasp of the world. Then again, what if there is no next chapter? What if that, like the S&P 500, is a mirage, a trick of the mind?
A certain thrill flourishes in that limbo space. I am reminded of Elsa in Frozen, when she literally creates bridges of ice as she jumps into the darkness of a chasm between two snowy cliffs. But not all of us are Ice Queens. What if I can’t forge my path in time? Will I fall?
At school (whether it be in-person or on Zoom), we are taught that asking the right questions is more important than finding the right answers. History certainly seems to prove it: Uncertainty lies at the foundation of progress, and our own ignorance of the world around us has fueled centuries of inquiry, discovery, development, and growth. We built skyscrapers on the simple daredevil question, how high can we go? We accelerated space research to land people on the moon after the question entered our minds: What if Russia got there first? We transferred our lives onto Facebook when we realized, How can I make even more friends?
Yet for some reason, the higher our skyscrapers go and the farther from Earth we venture, we grow less and less comfortable with the idea of uncertainty. The more we think we know all the answers to the universe, the more we detest any questions that throw doubt onto the truths we built around us. Even more hostile are we to the unknown and the unexpected—humanity expects to overpower time and fate by now, and it is a great disappointment to find that we are still no more in control of our lives than any other living creature on this planet. Shouldn’t we have known that this was going to happen? Why didn’t we stop this pandemic before it hit? Can we time travel yet?
Uncertainty is simply part of the human experience, and at this point, I’ve stopped searching for answers, not in the name of “embracing the unknown” but simply because who knows?
There is one thing I know, one answer to one question that restores faith in humanity’s ability to adapt and learn and redefine our tomorrow. In the haze of today’s chaos, this much I know:
Today is May 1. So what about tomorrow?
