The year is coming to an end, in a sideways movement, you could say with a word that has been very popular in recent weeks, and a leisurely one moreover – and some, so many people probably ask themselves: Was there something? Has anything happened in my life this year?
Apart from Corona, of course, apart from dealing with the consequences of the pandemic and the measures to get it under control. And if you ask yourself this question, answer it in the negative – there was nothing! – then comes to the conclusion that never before has a year passed as quickly as 2020.
The time has raced. But how does that fit in with the impressions that emerged during the spring lockdown, namely that time stood still? She stretched and stretched herself in the days when so little or nothing happened, there was nothing but the present.
A very total present, in which the measure of all life was not continuously “the big boom” with which the writer and contemporary fetishist Rainald Goetz expressed his enthusiasm for techno in the nineties, but the great silence. Or also: the “very brutal real reality”. But even in this it was so, once again Goetz, that “the experience (…) at the same time longed to understand each other.”
The past few months have brought some insights, especially in retrospect. The first lockdown was something of a total break-in. He severed all connections of the social “ever faster, ever further” – and from now on he made time, this scarce commodity, intensely tangible.
On the one hand, you could feel “for an enchanted moment” as a “conqueror of time”, to quote Hugo von Hofmannsthal, you could indulge in leisure and contemplation. On the other hand, a weariness about the excess of time became noticeable, time appeared, in reference to Kierkegaard, as a power “that moves people before nothing”.
Life in a kind of waiting room
Being able to appropriate one’s own time was just as welcomed (finally reading classics !, for example) as it was quite a burden, just an expression of Heidegger’s famous worry, the fear of uncertainty, the unpredictability of time.
Finally, when the summer came when it was “loosened”, there was a noticeable sigh of relief that things were going on again reasonably normally. You got away again, especially here in Germany, which was so admired around the world for “how well it got through the pandemic”.
The whole thing was reminiscent of a convalescence, a deceptive one, as many were well aware. But was powerfully repressed.
So it went outside, in the cafes and restaurants, sometimes more according to the rules for pandemic containment, sometimes less. The more sensible stayed at home or went on vacation in their own country (sensible?), The presumably less sensible boarded airplanes again and traveled somewhere in the world. Everything seemed a little the same as always. The experience of time settled back to a pre-pandemic level, a lack of time and a lack of time seemed to take over again – even though there was much talk of the second wave, life took place in a kind of waiting hall: There is still something to come!
Speed here, excess there
And it has come, this second wave, more massive than anyone – with the exception of Karl Lauterbach – would have thought. But can we now speak of a new edition for spring? The epidemic books from “The Plague” to Boccaccio’s “Decamerone” have all been discussed and read, they have reminded us that we have not become wiser, that the behavior is the same as it was before.
In the last few weeks of the partial lockdown, too, time has once again shown itself to be a multifaceted, hardly to be fathomed being: here speed, there excess.
Nevertheless, a lot is very different: We have got used to the pandemic, just think of the crowded shopping miles these days, of the many, no less full, mulled wine stands everywhere.
The number of infections has been at a high level for weeks, say politicians and virologists of precisely that “sideways movement”. According to RKI President Lothar Wieler, the plateau on which the infection figures are located appears “extremely fragile”; yes, and the situation is “bitterly serious”, said Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier last Friday.
Nevertheless, many people only shrug their shoulders at the dramatic pandemic. Habit rules.
Why? “Habit is a compromise”, wrote Samuel Beckett in 1960, “closed between the individual and his environment or between the individual and his own organic excesses, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning rod of his existence”. And further: “So habit is the expression for the countless contracts that are concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlating objects”.
Habit is a faithful servant of our instinct for self-preservation
Habit therefore contributes extremely much to being able to endure life itself, perhaps not being able to endure the suffering it inevitably brings with it: the suffering of an unrequited love, a broken relationship, the suffering, the illness cause that of death.
Habit is a faithful servant of our instinct for self-preservation, according to Marcel Proust “the only one of the old forces in this world who is stronger than suffering”. In conjunction with the displacement, the increasing number of corona deaths, the problems of many infected or supposedly convalescent could not be endured otherwise. As Proust goes on to say, to whom habit was especially helpful in overcoming his love for Gilbert and Albertine, which allowed him to see himself as a stranger who he was as a lover: “When habit is second nature so she prevents us from getting to know the first one of which she has neither the cruelty nor the magic. “
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The first nature is reality with its cruelty, also its magic. Because the pandemic is a unique negative experience, the most brutal real-time reality, to paraphrase Rainald Goetz, we made use of second nature and established ourselves in it. Proust again: “If there wasn’t such a thing as habit, life would necessarily appear delicious to all those who are threatened with death at any moment, that is, all of humanity.”
All of humanity now has this experience. The corona virus poses a deadly threat; Tragedy, the awareness of finitude and death determine existence. And then time comes into play again, that “double-headed monster of condemnation and redemption”, as Beckett described it in connection with Proust: its destructive character, its incomprehensibility.
The tenses overlap
Unlike in spring, the time is now completely mixed up. The tenses overlap, seem to have dissolved, even to have disappeared. The past is eons ago, but when you see pictures of full football stadiums, pop concerts or other mass events, it seems far from reality.
The present, especially the hedonistic obsession for the everlasting now, couldn’t be more dreary in its, as it were, imposed constant self-referentiality.
And then there are already hints of a future, still with the virus, but with vaccines against it. These are the savior, bring redemption. But the vaccines, as quickly as they were developed and approved, also need their time, and if that is the time to organize their administration.
We are currently moving in time traps. Or also: time vortex. The point is to finally break the wave, not to let a third arise, which, it is becoming apparent, can only be achieved with a hard lockdown. So at the moment nothing seems further than the beginning of the vaccinations, nothing further than redemption.
And predictions of how 2021 will be like 2022, how the time after the pandemic will develop in general, nobody may be affected at the moment because of “nothing will ever be the same again”, because of “everything will be exactly as before,” just a little worse. ”(Michel Houellebecq) Only one thing can be certain, as intense as the experience of pure time may have been: 2020 was a lost year – and it will be difficult to find again.
