Turn of the Century
Majeska illustration (1930) to Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The British Library.
By Alicia Manno
In the early days of the pandemic, I would go out walking every morning. My classes—by which I mean one hour and 15-minutes-long video conferences—didn’t start until later in the day, which gave me the liberty to walk from my house at the southwestern edge of Las Vegas to a mostly uninhibited view of the desert. On my pilgrimage out of the suburbs, I would try to follow Tich Nhat Hanh’s advice and meditate while I walked, being mindful of the rise and fall of each step. I liked to think that this activity connected me to other walkers throughout history, recalling Kant’s habit of walking at the same time each day and all of the long walks that occupy Jane Austen’s novels.
It was the only time of day when I let myself be, feeling my anxiety, or, much rarer, marveling at its absence. Most often, I felt anxious to arrive somewhere, to meet some end or result at that final vantage point. I would try journaling or writing poetry once I reached my destination, hoping for some sense of finality, or at least to prove to myself that the world still needed poets. But, as final as the early days of the pandemic felt—like civilization itself was coming to an abrupt end—I felt unsatisfyingly in-between, suspended in a moment of pre-arrival while having apparently surpassed the “post-”—post-modern, post-human, post-capitalist.
I’d been cast out from what I recognized as my life, a life that, in my second year of college, seemed to be finally forming into some discernable shape. I’d been estranged from myself, hesitant to claim all of the identities that my former self possessed. I was, and still am, equally unable to claim the self that I brought with me into this pandemic as I am a newly formed self. I, like so many others my age, am grasping at anything I can, trying to build a future for myself out of the scraps of a global pandemic—ill-equipped to be a poet, unprepared to do anything else.
* * *
Over Zoom, my professor compares Lord Henry to a cult leader. I have to agree. She’s talking about the same Lord Henry who famously corrupts (or, rather, excites the depravity of) the wide-eyed and beautiful Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde’s imagination. Lord Henry, like many a decadent dandy, incites ruin from sheer boredom. I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means, and about the particular late-19th-century literary movement in which Lord Henry is situated—Decadence.
Known best for its penchant for scandal, the movement took place during a moment in Europe that, much like ours, was at once so final and so anticipatory of things to come. Books from that period diagnose the malaise of fin de siecle, or turn of the century, Europe in usually absurd episodes of obsession, indulgence, and exhaustion. A long shadow of history stretched behind the late-century’s inhabitants, the boundaries of the human mind seemingly reached, the greatest feats of civilization apparently realized. With no room to grow, and impelled by boredom, many individuals—albeit the most aristocratic of them—were left only to the futile turning over of ideas that had already been expressed. Humanity’s heroes were no longer braving the treacherous seas or dueling cyclopes; they were embarking on aimless home decoration projects or fatally encrusting the shells of tortoises with fine jewels.
At the same time, however, festering just beneath the surface were the conditions that would eventually produce the first World War, as well as inventions that would, not more than a century later, threaten to make the planet uninhabitable. Just as civilization sought to claim mastery over the human condition, the pollution and poverty of urban life proved that we had not in fact reached the peak of humanity. Too many people were dying for us to claim victory, too many atrocities for us to affirm our own humanity. What is progress for some is an innovation in cruelty to others. And now I wonder if the turn of the century has come late this time around.
* * *
I’ve been trying for a while to build my case as to why right now particularly resembles the late 19th century. For one thing, the 1890s also saw a global pandemic, as the Russian flu claimed around one million lives from 1889 until the end of the century. But I’m most fascinated by the juncture between an old world and a new one—and a present that fails to connect the past, marked by all of the most wonderful and most terrible capacities of humans, with an unknowable future. Wilde’s characters, to be certain, were emerging from the old world of nobility and simplicity to a more complex world that they had not yet learned to live in; they, like us, were using a dead language in a world that had not yet invented a new one. That is to say, the pandemic has made all of our language, our ways of thinking, our ways of being obsolete while we are still trying to invent new ones.
Many of us now are bodies in waiting, uncomfortably inhabiting all of these liminal spaces—alone but not quite; having a nervous breakdown but not really; plunging into the unknown but with the uncanny feeling that we’ve been here before. I am in between what I have begun to call “my past life” and a future that, with no source of income and in the midst of a flailing attempt to establish a career, I don’t know how to create. I am in the trenches of COVID-19 paranoia and constant aloneness, feeling always that I am on the cusp of breaking through to the other side. Constantly in motion but never truly arriving.
I am too much on the cusp of a spiritual revolution, only glimpsing through the cracks in the wall what could be my enlightenment. But I know that I have no choice but to arrive here (for it is an arrival), in the in-between. I have no choice but to inhabit the alley between who I was and who I always have been. This, after all, is the raw material of our spiritual transformation. The pandemic is more than just a holding space transporting us from one age to the next. It is all things that a transition should be—volatile and terrifying and necessary—but it is an end in itself.
Painful as it is, we must choose to live here. We must choose to live here instead of holding out for a loftier existence. We must choose to live here, in a global pandemic. We must choose to let the walk be the end in itself, walking with an awareness of each step, recalling all of the people in history who have walked this way before.
Photo/Alicia Manno.
Alicia Manno is a student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is currently seeking a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Chinese. She has worked or interned for several literary publications, including Witness Magazine and The Believer.