The blog of Ron Schafrick
Tagged with: Nietzsche and the pandemic
The other day, when I opened my closet and looked at all the clothes hanging in there, at the dress shirts and dress pants, the blazers and ties, the dusty shoes, it struck me that I haven’t worn ninety percent of what was there in a year. It’s like someone died, I thought, and I remembered my mother’s closet after she had died and how I had to go through her clothes, deciding on what was to be thrown out and what was to be donated.
After nine years of living in South Korea, I moved back to Canada for good in 2006. I’d grown tired of always being perceived as a foreigner, and as a gay man I felt increasingly uncomfortable as my life came under greater scrutiny the longer I remained a “bachelor.” It was time to go home, time for a fresh start, and I looked to the future with excitement and optimism. What I didn’t expect was how difficult the subsequent years in Canada would be. I had not expected the extent to which I’d experience “reverse culture shock,” how financially difficult it would be, how deeply unhappy and, most surprising of all, how every bit of a foreigner I would feel in Canada. In short, those were “bad” years. And then I remember one Pride weekend, as I was negotiating my way through the crowded gay village in Toronto, when I heard a woman shout: “Yes! 2011 is the best year ever!” What news had she received that added to what sounded like an already wonderful year? I envied her, I remember thinking. Not that my own life by that point was all bad, but it certainly wasn’t as jubilant as hers. It was a year full of the usual ups and downs, just like any other. And although I can’t remember any specific high- or low-lights off-hand, I do recall resolving to stop dubbing years as either “good” or “bad,” a resolution that has unfettered me of a lot of unnecessary expectation and disappointment.
A couple days ago, while listening to the news, I heard a journalist interviewing Americans at Reagan International Airport in Washington who were travelling for the holidays. While many of them were well aware of the risks associated with travel at this time, they felt compelled to do so because they couldn’t imagine spending Christmas apart from their families. As one interviewee said, “I don’t know… It would be somehow wrong not to go.”
Apart from the exhilaration (along with the potential terrors) that comes with beginning a new story, I love how those initial stages of creation become something that dominates my thoughts instead of the usual petty concerns, worries, and gripes that tend to take front and centre. The same can be said, I’ve discovered, when it comes to reading Nietzsche (which, admittedly, I’ve become weirdly obsessed about over the last half year or so), as I find myself devoting a lot of those in-between moments to ruminating over his ideas, making connections to our present historical moment, and trying to find the answers to the numerous questions that come to mind. As Michael Tanner very aptly puts it in his excellent book Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction: “All good aphoristic writing is tiring to read, because one has to do so much of the writer’s work for him. [Nietzsche] supplies a sentence, the reader turns it into a paragraph.”