Laura Olin’s newsletter of “art, internet, and ideas” is a favorite of mine (subscribe here), and I appreciated her comments from this morning on why sci-fi and fantasy movies work for moments like these.
I’ve never thought of myself as a person who’s particularly into sci fi or fantasy. But on the worst days — and yesterday was one — I find myself thinking of the essential lessons of art in that genre. Maybe because a lot of it is about people in dire situations making stark moral choices for a larger good — and for various reasons World War II parables aren’t really going to do it anymore, at least in America. We saw Rogue One in the theater soon after Trump’s first election and I took some strength from the image of (vague spoilers) Felicity and Diego on the beach, sacrificing themselves to give everything thereafter a chance. I’ve been thinking of the Battlestar Galactica reboot of the W. Bush years, with the fighter pilots touching a portrait of a comrade on a fallen planet on their way out to battle; of Stellan Skarsgard’s speech and “one way out” in Andor, which you must watch; of Katniss touching three fingers to her lips in a salute special to her community, and a crowd of people she can’t even see saluting back; of the fundamental text that is “Why must we go on?” / “Because there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” Is all this cringe? Undoubtedly; but I think we’ve entered a time that requires deep earnestness. (I hope to come back to this paragraph in four years and feel I was being overly dramatic about how bad things might get but I suspect I will not.)
Laura Olin recently asked the readers of the Everything Changes mailing list how they knew they’d found the person they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with. Some of the responses might, well, is anyone chopping onions in here?
I first began dating my now husband back in the fall of 2008. It was only a couple of years after my father had passed away from lung cancer and the anniversary of his death was particularly difficult in those early years of heart aching loss as one might imagine. I warned him when the date was nearing because I wouldn’t be myself in the undertow of sadness that would take me. Fast forward a couple of years into our relationship, we had moved in together and shared our Google calendars with each other to make making plans and tracking things easier for the both of us (I would make plans without consulting him or have dinner with friends and forget to tell him and he’d have no idea where I was…whoops!). I was scrolling through into June to make some camping reservations and came across a note on June 26th on his calendar. He had made a note that just had my name and the words “Dad day”. That’s when I knew he was my person. He had marked down my sad day to be there for me. He has shown me in the almost 9 years we’ve been together so many other thoughtful ways he cares about me, but that was the moment.
I was only going to share one story but:
I have had two persons in my life; my late husband, and my best friend. I met my best friend one day in college; I hardly knew her, though I knew of her. For some reason, she wandered into my dorm room one afternoon, and burst into tears. She’d just had an abortion. I remember that I looked at her and thought, she’s my best friend forever. It was like a thunderbolt. She says something similar happened to her. We later discovered our dads had gone to the same high school in Cleveland, and that she and I had been born in the same hospital in Columbus, two months to the day apart, even though I then moved 2500 miles away from that town. We now work together and have for ten years. I think we’ll probably form a commune in Maine in twenty years and be together till the end.
My late husband…well, I was in Chicago, and struggling with whether to move to New York. I liked Chicago and didn’t want to leave, but my boyfriend at the time really wanted to go. But I woke up one more morning and just knew: If I move to New York, my life will change. So I did, and eighteen months after that, I got a call from a man named Peter, who needed to make a hire at his newspaper. We met at Grand Central and while I didn’t yet know he was going to be my husband, while I wasn’t even especially attracted to him physically, I was crazily attracted to him as a human being. I came home that night and told myself: I have to find a way to work for this man. I did. Two years later we were together, and we belonged to each other for 17 years. He died four years ago. His last week in the hospital, he held my hand and said, “You’re my person.”
I was raised in a pretty abusive household. When I was 14, I found a boarding school three thousand miles away, applied in secret, got a full scholarship, and left home. I haven’t lived at home since and have made it ten years later fully supporting myself in a city I love, a job I love, friends/community that I love. I sometimes think about that now, packing up everything and moving across the country without any support and building a new life for myself through a lot of luck and other people’s help, and know I probably couldn’t do it again. I left the worse place for paradise, both handed-out and self-made, and there’s nothing I’m prouder of.
Some regretted not having courage at times:
A few months ago, some coworkers made some antisemitic jokes in a team chat channel. I quit the channel and started looking for (and since found) a new job, but I didn’t say anything. I’ve thought about that time I didn’t say anything literally every day since. I wish I had been a better person.
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