SHI 12.31.2020: The Death of Spontaneity

SHI: 12/23/2020: Predictions for 2021
December 23, 2020
SHI 1.06.2021: An Unusual Day
January 6, 2021

I had not planned to post another blog in 2020.   Then I came across this article from The Economist magazine.  It appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition of The World in 2021 under the headline “Covid-19’s first casualty.”   I felt it was worth sharing.   Happy New Year.

  • Terry Liebman


 

SOME WEEKS into the new year, K decided that he must see a doctor. The surgery was only at the end of the road. Once or twice, he had thought of popping in as he went past, but immediately stifled the idea. You didn’t just pop into places, when you never knew who might have been sitting on that chair or turning the pages of that copy of Homes and Gardens. He must think it out. It was clear, though, that he needed to do something. For, though his life was perfectly comfortable and successful, he was starting to feel troubled.

Once he had breezed through the world, carefree as a lark. He would spring from bed most mornings, throw up the blind, fling open the window, deep-breathe the morning air. Now he got up more circumspectly, so as not to trip on the duvet and sprain something. He pulled the blind gently, for he couldn’t be sure of finding anyone to fix it if it jammed. And if he heard the man in the downstairs flat coughing again in his kitchen, he gave the morning air a miss

Before, he would often grab breakfast on the run: seize something he fancied from someone’s ungloved hands and then dart, untangling his earphones as he went, across the main road, waving for the bus to wait. Or he would graze, if he felt like it, from the fruit stall by the Tube. To crunch directly into an apple picked up from an open box—or, for that matter, a hot onion bhaji, or cockles by the sea—without a second thought! But now, in J. Alfred Prufrock’s words, did he dare to eat a peach? Or anything else unwrapped?

As he chewed his home-soaked muesli, K soberly debated with himself, as he did almost daily, whether he needed to go into the office or not. He could not go just because he suddenly felt like it. He had to commit himself. The word “suddenly” itself was always suspect; there should be a proper reason. The city was once a place into which he would plunge every day like a swimmer, taking on everything it might throw at him. Now it was the place from which, on returning, he immediately and laboriously washed his hands.

How unconsidered that old existence seemed! How unexamined, how thoughtless! Back then he was forever nipping out of the office as the mood took him. He would try on jackets just for fun, or spend an hour in a bookshop sampling Zola one minute, Plath the next—why not? Now, if he needed to indulge in this primitive form of shopping at all, he decided what he wanted first and went straight to it, considered, undistracted: a serious citizen with his thoughts in order.

They were always in order now. Once he and his colleagues in the pub of an evening would bounce any number of crazy ideas off each other, from suddenly stripping naked and jumping in the river to launching a new Ponzi scheme. Silly of course. Who knew what submerged rocks and shopping trolleys lurked in the river? And who knew where all the mad schemes had gone? They seemed as vacuous as the hearty high-fives and shoulder-slaps that used to go with them. As for those productive huddles round a screen, cooking up new schemes—why take the risk? Why even bother to notice the will-o’-the-wisp of the light-bulb thought?

In his so-recent street-wandering days he could also catch the eyes of young women who might return his smile, fall into chance conversation and, with luck, end up in bed with him. #MeToo had already put a crimp on that. Now the whole business seemed deeply inadvisable. He no longer wanted to risk going to their flat, nor they to his. A kiss, a tumble, a mere knee-rub in the back row of the Arthouse cinema, were unthinkable. Even the office had become forlorn. The notching-up of chance liaisons while raiding the biscuit cupboard now seemed as irresponsible as accumulating air miles with a quick weekend in Venice, which he had managed once.

Diagnosis of death
He still dreamed, unfortunately—his libido being as carefree as ever—of sweeping up Doreen from Data in his arms, burying his face in her wild red tresses, and flying halfway round the world with her. But now he knew, in his waking hours, that he must not entertain the possibility without a detailed risk assessment. And it suddenly struck him, with a great tremor, that he might actually be ill.

His online appointment with Dr M was brief. In the event, it took the kindly medic no time at all to make the diagnosis. K’s spontaneity had died; and that death, Dr M assured him, was universal.

Ann Wroe: obituaries editor, The Economist

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