I’ve spent the morning reflecting on this year’s journal entries. Although I contracted it two months ago, I am still recovering cognitively from COVID – or so I’ve been telling everyone, including myself. But what I find in reviewing my journal is that my supposed symptoms of long COVID – poor focus, low energy, fickle attention span, depression – are things I’ve been trying to suss out in the pages of my notebook all year. Perhaps there’s more to the picture than this Rousseauian fantasy of, “before I had COVID, I was mentally perfect, and since my fall from grace, I carry its mark with me, trying to reclaim my state of perfection, searching high and low for the trapdoor to my psychic Eden, which COVID alone has hidden from me.”
I have long been skeptical of man’s place in the modern world. I have been skeptical of my or anyone’s evolutionary fitness for sitting in front of a computer screen forty hours a week. On a long hike this summer, I felt very at ease, like I could carry on for hours along the narrow footpath through the forest. Focus on each coming step was not difficult, and the weight of my pack intruded little into my mind. I was sweaty, aired out, and able. While setting up camp for the evening, it did not matter whether I felt like reading the book I had brought. The swaying trees reflected in the pond were their own cinema, the sighing wind its own soundtrack, the singing crickets and loons and birds the accompanying symphony. I felt no need nor lack of manmade entertainments – maybe nearly a disdain, a fundamental objection to a perceived blasphemy against the perfection of the surrounding garden. All signs of human activity were immersion-breaking, a taint to be avoided. A digital screen, especially, would have been an affront. I know I am not alone in feeling this way sometimes, because I have seen the same message presented ironically in this meme:
But this is the same fallacy as the brain fog. The woods are not a film, and I do not need to suspend my disbelief to be in them. Nor are they located in some alternate dimension, outside of time. The Adirondack Park exists in the form I was able to enjoy it largely because of modern attitudes towards land conservation, environmental protection, and the perceived sacredness of undisturbed nature. “Forever Wild” is a phrase which belies its youth. It too subscribes to Rousseau: because the world was perfect before Man’s corruption, we must maintain the perfect world by endeavoring never to fall. We will nail trail markers to the birches and stumps of Eden which walk the path of grace. Regardless of the Park’s view of its own temporality, and its claims of eternal life I will never be able to verify, it existed when I did, and that’s all that mattered to me.
Maybe there’s utility in the ideal of the Before Time, whether it’s truly believed or not. Maybe skepticism towards modernity is valuable in some ways – like, it’s good to be conscious of how much time is spent looking at a screen – and useless in others – like, the world operates on screens now, and I’m typing this letter on a screen, and it’s actually pretty convenient for me. Likewise, maybe there’s some utility in the concern around cognitive performance – like, making sure I get enough sleep, and varying my activities, and recognizing that drinking is different after 30, and doing my best to stop hitting my head and getting COVID – and maybe some of it is useless, because my mind has never been perfect, and time spent fretting over my fall from grace is a self-defeating anxiety. I was never graceful, I'm just nostalgic.
The purpose of the censer is to send drifting to the heavens. There is no use in grasping at the smoke, nor in panic when your fingers pass through it.