Nathan Schiller

At the beginning of the year, I ran into a colleague in the elevator and asked about his New Year’s. He said it went fine and well, but that he was worried about coronavirus. Ah, I said, it’s nothing, just a headline from across the globe, and anyway these things are always overblown.

In mid-February, I developed a dry cough, and my throat ached if I spoke for more than a minute. After a couple weeks, I went to the doctor, and they asked if I’d been exposed to anyone with Covid-19. I said no, but how would I know? You could only get tested if you presented at the hospital with severe symptoms, or played in the NBA, or starred in big-budget Hollywood movies. They tested me for strep, and I was negative.

Over the next two weeks, it became clear that Covid-19 had been spreading through New York City uncontrollably, and that the only way to stop it was to shut down everything except essential services. The subway is the city’s barometer of liveliness, and ridership plunged nearly 90 percent practically overnight. Humans are a social species, and suddenly we would do anything to avoid one another.

Some years ago, I posited to a friend that we were lucky, in a cool, ethereal way, to have lived through a turn of a millennium. But my friend didn’t think so. 2000 had been just another year.

So what, now, about 2020?

The American failure on Covid-19 was tragic fate

I wish this year-in-review could be fundamentally reflective. But the pandemic is still upon us, and winter will be dark. This is more fate than choice. Our ultra-individualistic, deeply politically divided, faux freedom-loving country never could have banded together to shelter in place and subsidize wages, while reasonably containing the virus and plotting a quick but cautious transition back to normal cultural and economic life. Our amoral bigoted conman president understood this paralysis, and sensing the fissures, he inflamed them. Such behavior was unexpected for such a lazy, cowardly narcissist who has no strategy and no tactics, just aggression and dominance.

I also wish to think there will one day be a national reckoning over the needless amount of physical and psychological suffering the pandemic will have wrought. But we see, especially in our unchecked digitally mediated universes, only what we want. Where Covid-19 destroys one person, the person next door says the virus doesn’t exist, or is just the flu, or is being handled incorrectly by corrupt doctors and nurses. Whatever the reasoning, the idea behind the disbelievers is at base the same: any imposition on American freedom—with freedom defined as “enjoying all the comforts and pleasures you can pay for or bully your way into while assuming no responsibility if said actions hurt others”—is tyranny.

Did I have Covid?

Back in March, after ten days of quarantining, my symptoms subsided. I find it implausible that I did not have Covid, but a couple months ago, I tested negative for antibodies, though that doesn’t mean I didn’t develop and then shed them. Plus, my wife, who was roughly as sick as I was back in February and otherwise fine, has twice tested positive for antibodies. All this only muddies the critical questions for me: did I have it (and what will the lasting damage be?), and do I have immunity?

In the absence of answers, I will end the year in relative quarantine, awaiting a vaccine sometime in the new year, hopefully.

The only other story this year was the fight for racial justice

As a kid I was always drawn to historical timelines by year. I remember that our middle school yearbooks came with an insert that told us how Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys were among the biggest events of our time. Who- or whatever are this year’s equivalents, I have no clue. Were I fifteen years younger—or maybe even just five—I’m sure I would remember 2020 for the NBA playoff bubble as much as the NBA shutdown (announced March 11), but I couldn’t even find the time or desire to watch LeBron win his fourth championship. I can’t even remember a single uplifting thing that happened in technology or engineering or the arts. It was all congressional investigations and cancel culture.

Historical waves are more fun than facts, yet it’s a decent joke to point out that historians will one day specialize in eight-hour stretches of 2020. This year we had detail and sweep, all at once, all the time. After George Floyd was murdered, on Monday, May 25, by the Minneapolis police, mass protests began in cities and quickly spread to areas with residents that would have seemed unlikely to demonstrably call for racial justice. The protests were popular, drawing the support of two-thirds the country, and they did not disband, despite the president’s threats for “law and order.” After a week, during the late afternoon of the first of June, demonstrators sat peacefully outside the White House, when the president gassed them for a photo op. Six weeks later, as the demonstrations continued in Portland, federal law enforcement officers used unmarked vans to kidnap protestors.

My 2020 blog posts

I began this blog on April 10 and figured that would be a good monthly date on which to publish. My first post explained why I was starting a blog, which was not about coronavirus, during coronavirus, and my third post was all the nothingness I could muster about the protests as they occurred in real time. In between, I did an audio essay connecting Mr. Rogers to the melodies of Franz Schubert, the story that incited the blog.

Since then, I’ve argued for writing over video and critiqued the hollowness of the American cultural and institutional consciousness. I’ve done two photo essays, of Inwood Hill Park and Fort Tryon Park, the two public green spaces I enjoy every day. I expect to keep writing in these veins.

I also started co-hosting an awesome, invigorating new running podcast, called Let’s Get Uncomfortable. I was also fortunate enough to sneak in an ultramarathon before the pandemic, my first race since I tore my hamstring six years ago. I then tweaked the same hamstring a couple months into the pandemic; but with no races until at least next spring, I have been largely recovering and cycling. All in all, as of this post, this year I ran 646 miles, and biked 1,130 miles. (On January 1, 2021, I’ll update the final mileage totals at the bottom of this post.)

This year I read few books, wrote little fiction, and consumed an obscene amount of political newsalism. I played a lot of Schubert, Schumann, and Bach, and discovered Florence Price. I also watched a number of films, the best of which is Burning. In fact, I would say, it is the most memorable nonpolitical art I encountered this year, though, of course, like all art, it is steeped in gradations of power.

Perhaps what 2020 has done, then, is remind us of the ferociousness with which the political infiltrates the personal, and how our experiences, and in particular the Americanness of our lives, continues to be marked, in large part, by the degree to which we never have to think about this.

Update

Final mileage totals for 2020:

Running: 661

Cycling: 1,213