Happy upcoming New Year! (En)

Happy upcoming New Year, my dear friends!

Only recently L. introduced me to a fairly old-fashioned American tradition (or is it also European? Perhaps: I don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to Google it for the sake of a trivial mystery), when members of the family exchange Christmas cards where they make a brief recap of the year, mostly featuring its bright moments and purposefully (and quite rightfully) omitting the bleak ones. These are called circular letters.

So there: let’s pretend it’s one of these archaic things: it will make this reading as boring as it is heart-warming (or so I hope, LOL).

The year 2020 was a big ordeal for us all, and it doesn’t even sound like a cliché*: going through all the difficulties and challenges of the pandemic, with its constant fears and uncertainty, cancellations of things that were an essential part of our very existence (travels for academic, business and other purposes, meetings with friends and members of the family, going places, such as concerts and exhibitions, or just going out for a cup of coffee in your favourite place, you name it) was rough. Many people got sick, some of them did not make it, and 2020 became an excruciating tragedy.

If someone asked me how I’d describe the year using only a few words, I’d say without hesitation: fear, boredom, and procrastination. I am not the strongest person in the world, neither I am the bravest, so all the news about Covid made me constantly anxious: what if?.. It didn’t happen (although I cannot use the word “luckily” here, because a constrained life in disquiet isn’t the best thing in the world), despite a suspicious incident that happened to L. in the beginning of June: the test didn’t show anything, but was it good enough? I don’t know.

The eternal recurrence of our lockdowns was Nietzschean enough to re-formulate that perception of amor fati, love of the fate, again and again: can you really place yourself in the world or is it an illusion? I would say, both.

I wrote something, academic and whatnot, and I was wandering around Fenland, falling in love with its macabre marshes again and again (thanks to Parnell’s book, “Ghostland,” which I read in the beginning of 2020: maybe that’s why it was shaped so strangely? I don’t know). 2020 gave me a new perspective on Lovecraft as well— the one connected with the old British traditions (English and Welsh) via MR James and Arthur Machen. They made my self-exile significantly more interesting, that’s for sure.

There also was Cromer, which gave L. and myself a glimpse of normality: we both needed it so desperately. Cromer’s spirit helps me keep going: I know that one day I will go there again.

There was also Invisalign! Silly me, I now have more or less straight teeth, and for a mature woman in her middle forties it is an astonishing—and still a new—thing.

So, it wasn’t that bad overall, right? Wrong: it was. That is why I want it to be over—for myself, and for each and every of you, my friends, because we all deserve to be liberated from fear and from our confinement. And may it be over in 2021. Dum spiro spero.

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* Of course, it does, but for sealing the deal with a figure of speech I will leave it just like that.