post- 11/13/2020

In This Issue

Adi Thatai

2

Birdkeeper

Siena Capone 4

Wish You Were Here Antonia Huth 4

Report From a Pilgrimage-in-Process Liza Edwards-Levin

Fever Pitch 5

Zach Braner 6

The End of History

postCover by Seabass Immonen

NOV 13

VOL 26

— ISSUE 9

FEATURE

Birdkeeper

watching my dad birdwatching

By Adi Thatai Illustrated by Naya Lee Chang

I

noticed that you fell in love with the birds this summer. As your kidneys shrank, I think your interests did too.

It started small. You started by looking out the window. You never did that before. Or perhaps, more truthfully, I never bothered to notice. Every day after lunch, you stood at the kitchen window looking at our backyard, your upper back hunched as always, your thinning, graying hair messy over your scalp, peeling an orange and eating it slice by slice. Your calloused fingers moved, but you didn’t look down.

The days you stood there longest, planted and unmoving, were the warmest ones. On those days of streaming sunlight, the romping sparrows weren’t afraid of the hawks and even the cowardly cardinals would criss-cross through the trees, blood-red spots flitting against the sky for what could be no reason but fun. You planted your feet and looked out. I don’t think you noticed me watching. Those were the days you called me over. You handed me an orange slice. Do something nice for your father, you said. I want a bird feeder. Did you know we live across from a bird sanctuary? I never noticed.

*** He never did that. My father. He would never stand there and watch the birds. He’s the kind of man who keeps his head down. At least that’s how I know him.

I remember one night on a family vacation in Maine, I was out late on the deck, resting my elbows on the railing, staring up at a pin-pricked, starry sky cut open by the white arc of the Milky Way. He came out and stood next to me in silence. He glanced up, breathed in, and said, When your great-grandfather turned 80, I got him his first pair of glasses. He put

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, I don’t like to talk about lasts; they make me sappy and teary-eyed. Maybe it’s just that I’m a senior, so lasts have been at the forefront of my mind lately. I know what’s in store for the remainder of the school year: A final stroll through College Hill, a final shopping period, a final post- prod night (I shudder at the thought), even a final final exam (this I won’t shed any tears over…probably).

Lasts remind me of the uncertainty that accompanies change, and fears of being plunged into the great unknown. While this may sound overly dramatic and existential, keep in mind that it’s 2020 and nothing is off the table. Yet as we enter the final months of this unprecedented year—one that can’t seem to end soon enough—I’ve found myself becoming more and more preoccupied with the future, more and more absorbed in the past. But maybe this is how I fend off the present, for now.

This week, our writers look forward to the future while revisiting and rediscovering the past. In Narrative, a writer discusses pen pals and postcards, while

Embarrasing Middle School Memories

another writer describes the process of writing her senior thesis, fantasizing about future victory over this herculean task. In Arts & Culture, one writer reflects on the music and TV shows that provided her comfort as she battled the flu in years past, while the other writer ponders the image of future society through the works of Fukuyama and H. G. Wells. And in Feature, a writer explores memories of birdwatching and his relationship with his father.

In these trying times, our magazine has been a weekly refuge from the uncertainty of the world.

Luckily for me (and for you, dear reader), this is not the last issue of post- this semester, merely the second-to-last. And as I said, I don’t like to talk about lasts—so I won’t.

1. Literally fighting over rubber bands (Silly Bandz) 2. Pairing a plaid seafoam green button down with highlighter orange shorts 3. Stirring the pot on Ask.fm 4. Rocking accidental scene hair because my mom didn’t want to spend money on a proper barber 5. u got kik?

6. Like my post for a tbh (the tbh in question: ur cool) 7. Buying a mini-chandelier to decorate my locker with

All the Best,

Jasmine Ngai

Narrative Managing Editor

8. Thinking rawr xD was a personality trait 9. Using “YOLO” as a justification for poor coping mechanisms 10. Refusing to wear jeans and only wearing yoga pants with clogs

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FEATURE them on for the first time at night in the village and began to cry. My father paused. He said to me, I never knew that this is what the stars look like. There were only a couple coughing stars visible in the polluted Indian sky. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he could have seen so many more here. My dad clicked his tongue, disappointed.

He bent his head down, and he walked inside.

I don’t blame him. I know how cruel the earth has been to him. *** You asked me to buy the bird feeder. I didn’t.

I’m sorry. You ordered it and it came in the mail on an overcast Saturday. I didn’t assemble it until you asked. I’m sorry. We laughed at how it looked, a wide plastic cylinder covered by a translucent, red pyramid meant to keep squirrels off—like a plastic man with a sombrero, you said. We laughed harder when Mama said she would buy a BB gun to shoot off any adventurous squirrels. We only laughed because she was serious.

Once you asked me to, I hung the bird feeder on a hook right outside the window. Soon enough, the birds came. Squeaking and chirping flurries of gray, yellow, red, and green. Look, look, look! Look at these two. They keep coming back, always together!

You pointed out two small chubby golden birds with orange beaks, dashed with black patterning and gray highlights. I think they’re a couple. I wonder what kind of bird they are.

For your birthday, I surprised you with the Birds of Massachusetts Field Guide. American goldfinch, you identified quickly. That’s the couple.

Those are my lovebirds. You smiled as the two played around the feeder, circling and chasing each other like ribbons of streaming gold. They warbled with lightness. You let loose a backarching laugh. Amazing.

I didn’t tell you, but I remembered then the last time we watched birds together. I was young, and we were walking the dog quietly in that big meadow across from my elementary school, the dry leaves of early fall crunching lightly beneath our feet.

Suddenly, in the distance rose a cloud of small black birds, flapping and squawking together in a rogue dark storm against a cloudless sky. We both looked.

The dog barked. They disappeared into nothingness as fast as they came. You waited in silence. You clicked your tongue, inhaled, and said, I learned something today. My father died in the coal mines.

I read it. I read that a study found that coal miners are at a higher risk of multiple myeloma. He died of multiple myeloma working in the Bihar mines to give me my life. I look at this country and think what could have been different if he lived here. I think about if he would have let me bring him here, if he could live here. Like I do. If I didn’t leave him. My grandfather

died only 9 years ago. You paused. No son should die a decade after his father. You took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air, turned around, and we walked home silently. You were talking about your father, but even then, I got the sense that you were talking about yourself. A canary in the coal mine. A warning.

I should have known. *** My father was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, a condition where one’s kidneys progressively lose function until they fail, when he was 30. He didn’t tell me until he was 55. A part of the reason my family left India: his kidneys were shrinking. Your sister almost died, he told me when I asked why we were here in the States.

Five near-death asthmatic attacks. Delhi pollution was horrible. We had to leave. He only told me later that they also needed to seek more advanced care for his disease. Under the clean skies of suburban Michigan, my sister’s asthma vanished, and the progress of my dad’s disease slowed to a halt. That’s where I was born, took my first breaths. Clean air.

I think about what could have been if my father had been born here. Like me. He told me that he didn’t know what caused his condition, but I had my suspicions. A little digging, and I found a 2018 paper from a national research institute in Taiwan showing that each 10 μg/m³ increment of PM2.5 particulate matter concentration increases the risk of chronic kidney disease by 6 percent. In 2018, PM2.5 concentration in Delhi averaged 115 μg/m³. I don’t think my father knows. 30 years of dirty air is what did it. That is where he was born.

We had to leave. He lowered his eyes. I think about who couldn’t leave. I think about Karan.

Karan was my cousin. He died in India when he was ten — childhood leukemia. A little more digging, and I found a 2008 study from Taiwan suggesting a link between childhood leukemia and exposure to traffic-related pollutants.

My father knows how cruel the earth has been.

He knows it will get worse.

He told me about his disease during my senior year of high school. He only told me because he had to. After 20 years, his kidneys had begun to shrink again.

I will live. I should be fine. Dialysis will start in the next few years. Surgery, too. It will disrupt everything.

Mama will be the donor. No, you can’t be my donor, you’re too young; you might need your kidney later.

Mama and I will both have to stop working. We need to pay off the mortgage first and keep enough aside for your college and our retirement. I want you and your sisters to be secure and safe before I go into this.

This is what stresses me.

I wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter, that we would be fine, that he didn’t have to sacrifice his

happiness for my comfort like he always did. That I just wanted to see him happy.

I said nothing.

I’m sorry. *** You used to say something in the car on pretty days, when the highway felt long and the horizon lay in repose, the world stretching out before us. This country has so much, you would notice, clicking your tongue in disappointment, as if you didn’t deserve the beauty you get to live through, as if the ugly was your fault. I wonder if you know that the British were the first to mine coal in India; two white men of the East India Company, John Sumner and Grant Heatly, began commercial coal mining along the Damodar River in 1774, not far from where you were born, not far from where your father worked.

You were never disappointed when you watched the birds.

You asked me to buy a hummingbird feeder. I didn’t. I’m sorry. You bought it. I’m not sure if you noticed, but I put it together when it came, without you asking. I mixed the sucrose and water and filled up the hanging glass jar, a little sweet water spilling out of the red plastic flowers at the base. I hung it up outside your office window. The hummingbirds came that day. How fast news spreads, you marveled.

You said they moved like dragonflies. I thought they were hard to spot, but you always noticed them flying by. Glinting green bodies streaked with red and buzzing with electricity, up, down, forward, and backward, levitating in all directions as if pulled along by an invisible thread. They move so strangely, you said. You watched as the hummingbirds floated up to the feeder, shy at first, sticking their long beaks into the plastic flowers to drink the sugar water.

They became your favorites almost immediately.

You called me over. Look at their red throats.

You opened the Birds of Massachusetts Field Guide; I hadn’t noticed that you kept it on your desk. The ruby-throated hummingbird. Native to the Americas. You smiled quietly. They don’t live in India. You kept smiling.

Birdkeeper. That’s what you called me. The only one tall enough to take down the feeders to clean and refill them. I complained, but you said, What’s the point in having a son if he won’t do your work? I’m old now. You’re young. Use your energy. I grumbled at first, but soon I began to like it. You stopped needing to ask. I remember leaving for a weekend trip this summer—I stopped you as we pulled out of the driveway, realizing I had forgotten to refill the feeders. I made you wait in the car.

You really care about these birds, you said as we left.

I want you to know that it wasn’t the birds.

“It's like he just thought: Oh no I need a hobby — what do people who wear hats do?”

“I think that one of us, just for the heck of it, should find out about urine.”

November 13, 2020 3

NARRATIVE

Wish You Were Here a love letter to pen pals

by Siena Capone Illustrated by ElLiana Reynolds “Un francobollo, per favore?”

The employee at the tabbachino was unimpressed, sliding a packet of stamps in my direction. In English: “here you go.” Almost three years of learning Italian and the try-hard air of an American accent suffocating my pronunciation gave it away.

Regardless, I left with stamps, which was the goal.

It would be another hour of shuffling around a Florence piazza until I could find a little yellow mailbox and deliver my handful of postcards, slipping the bundle of well wishes and retellings of my misadventures on the bus system into a slot that seemed a little too easy for someone to reach into. In June of 2019, temperatures in Florence hit 110 degrees some days. My back was plastered with the sweaty sunflower pattern of my dress, a garden just-watered.

One postcard was for my parents. A few for my friends, some for family members. Glossy, doctored photographs of the Ponte Vecchio smothered in lateday sun, under Firenze in corny WordArt fonts. An unsealed invitation into the world I was occupying miles away, reachable through a few sentences. A birth certificate for a new self—someone feeding off of pineapple gelato and fleeing catcalls bred by a culture even more blatantly patriarchal than America’s. More than a WhatsApp message received while my parents were asleep and responded to while I was asleep, less than putting the bumps of the bus over the road under their feet, letting them sway to it, one hand on the stanchion. This is what I can give them to hold instead: I am here and I am thinking of you. *** I never met my first pen pal in person. She was a patient of my Dad’s (he’s an opthamologist) who was my age and shared a few scattered childhood interests. Our letters primarily fixated on comparing American Girl doll mythologies (how cool that Kirsten came all the way from Sweden!), dispersed among earnest commentary about our worlds at that imminent moment (sorry for my handwriting, I’m writing in the car).

This genuine tenderness for a stranger feels antiquated compared to the Internet, with its Twitter feuds and the pervasive worldwide feeling that we are all entitled to each other’s time, an immediate reply, or validation when we demand

it. There are a lot of meaningful ways the Internet has positively changed communication; no matter how closed-off or conservative my hometown felt in my early teen years, there was always community—and human compassion—to be found between song recommendations and blogs charmingly overdone in pastels by another something-teen grappling with our world.

But it feels so fixed, communication on the Internet. If someone doesn’t reply to your text for a month, most would say they’re probably not interested in continuing the conversation. If someone doesn’t reply to your letter for a month, they might be overwhelmed with the holidays or with the events you’ll read about in a matter of time; the postal service is a third party to blame for a slow response. There’s an element of trust in a person whose personal life you don’t have any access to outside of college-ruled lines.

Trust that they’ll reply. That they’ll tell you something new. That you’ll keep tying each conversation to the next, like ribbons of speech.

Our first snow this winter yesterday. It gets so dark so early now…

A pretty red sweater…

Sorry it’s been so long, I… *** My second pen pal was found as by-chance as a lucky penny. We were on a vacation in Anna Maria Island when I was somewhat young, probably 10 or 11. I don’t remember how or where we found this girl and her family; the memories of that trip are scattered clouds drifting over the sand we knelt in, digging for who knows what, chatting about Total Drama Island (critical media discourse). She was from Michigan, like I was, a horseback rider, like I was. We both had little brothers. When we went home, we scribbled gel pen letters to each other that shuttled back and forth across our state, no longer a hotel room apart, but still only an interstate apart.

Over time, we stopped writing to each other.

The letters are flotsam in the wreckage of my house’s basement clutter. I’m not sure where they are. All that remains is one memory. Sometime into the vacation where we met, I had spotted her on the beach—glasses, cropped brown hair stuffed under a bucket hat—shoveling open a divot in the sand. I took off running towards her and her hollow-in-progress, greeted her excitedly, only to see her look up from under the brim of her hat and realize it wasn’t her at all, but some other girl. This was, of course, mortifying for an eleven year-old. I shuffled off to where the water lapped quietly at the shore, angry at this person I did not know for not being someone I barely knew. That I had run to the mailbox and found it empty.

I can’t recall the rest of that trip or pen palship, and I’m not sure why. What’s strange is that if she still has the letters, she probably has a better

documentation of my life at that time than me; letter after letter, chapter after chapter of what it means to be eleven and looking for a friend-shaped thing on the shore. Pen pals become your historians, and you become theirs, safekeeping each other’s past selves in the drawers of your desk or in boxes in the attic. *** In our first year of college, my high school friends and I would send postcards to each other, as if we were simply on vacation. In a way, this was true: We had found four-year paradises of our own, in contrast to high school. This meant different things for each of us: From a place with no academic requirements, to a place where all pants were high-waisted, to a place where the football team actually wins. And before we had really settled into these new realities, we felt like they were just brief visits to a place unknown.

At Brown, I accumulated correspondents in a way just as lucky as years ago on that beach. This place of dorm rooms and awkward circles of students on the grass with their Ratty takeout—so terrifying, so ripe with chance. In college, I learned the art of stumbling upon friends: in the airport, during my ephemeral (and sweaty) equestrian career, in the bathroom during a particularly perilous and crowded orchestra party. These were the people I wrote home about, events in and of themselves; and over time and with closeness, they became the people who, the next summer, I sent postcards to from Italy.

The little amount of space provided on postcards presents a challenge to render each moment in miniature, with enough details to be tantalizing but succinct enough to fit. It’s how I imagine crafting news headlines would be: Definitely Not a Waste of Time: Five-Hour Bus Trip To Castle Where Dante “Might Have” Spent the Night Once (Not Clickbait).

Snapshots of these moments in time are delivered to the three-line addresses sitting beside abbreviated tales: paintings of forlorn religious figures, summer heat that thickened the air, olive trees in sloping valleys. I penned every experience in my head as it happened, already preparing the way I’d retell it in a letter. In short: I see each place I go as a story, then I tell it the best I can.

A party in an ancient fort…

They were staring because we don’t shave our legs…

The bus is always either five minutes early, or five minutes late…

I can’t wait to tell you more when I see you again…

Love, Siena

Report From a Pilgrimage-inProcess on academic endeavors and anxiety monsters

By Antonia Huth Illustrated by Ella Harris First comes the doom. The certainty of looming danger, of knowing you’re in over your head. It’s a full-bodied anxiety tickling in your bones. It’s the feeling of sitting on a plane, watching the world recede below you and knowing that yes, this is really happening. Only you’ve never seen your destination and suddenly, though you booked the trip so cheerfully, you’re not so sure if you’ll like it there—or if you’ll be able to survive at all.

Then you hear a ping. Someone has sent you a text and you momentarily lose yourself in the sweet oblivion of social media. When you come back, the Word document on your laptop screen no longer

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ARTS & CULTURE

screams like a white void of annihilation; rather, it looks reassuringly ordinary. It’s just writing a thesis.

Why the drama?

When I signed up back in February to write a Bachelor’s thesis, the tasks at hand—find a general area of interest, find a reader, obtain a letter of recommendation—were simple, clear-cut, and decidedly achievable. I did not conceive of them as the beginning of a journey which, I thought, lay far ahead — all the way in August. Looking back, I think of myself much like the medieval pilgrim who, having never travelled further than a day’s walk, gladly sets off without the slightest ability to fathom a distance as great as the one from Central Europe to Jerusalem. The process of actually writing the thesis I was preparing for seemed so distant that I could not even envision the outline of the beast and allowed myself to blissfully ignore its existence.

And then it was August. Through the wisdom and guidance of my two mentors, the esteemed Dr. Koch, thesis advisor par excellence, and Umberto Eco, author of Come si fa una tesi di laurea (How to Write a Thesis), published originally in Italian in 1977 and in English, for the first time, in 2015), I had slowly crawled over the summer towards the beast.

Now I was close enough to perceive, for the first time, its colossal shape against the morning mist. The doom settled in.

When you start writing a thesis you do not actually start writing a thesis. What you do instead is read. First, you read (or watch, in my case) whatever source material you are working with. Then, you read library catalogues and database search results and the works cited pages of more distinguished thinkers in order to compile your own bibliography.

Then, if you’re me, you go back to reading Umberto Eco for a while because the research is very scary and exhausting. Finally, at long last, you sit down and you start writing—not the beast itself, of course, but the first in a seemingly never-ending series of ephemeral outlines constructing the foundation of your thesis.

During this time, I felt the mist clearing more and more each day. The beast finally took shape, and I discovered that yes, it could be slain. I planned out my schedule for the year, experienced the first semblances of interesting thought, and felt accomplished every time I added another intriguing title to my reading list. My confidence, though frail, was renewed.

On the other hand, simply discovering the beast could be slain did not necessarily mean I felt up to the task. With every waft of mist I cleared, another gruesome detail of the monster’s statue emerged. A fuller grasp of what was to come translated not only into confidence but, more immediately, into a slew of new tasks on my to-do list. Pilgrim-me had met her first troupe of returning travelers and, though they assured the possibility of success, they also reminded

her how long the path really is.

Unlike many others, I am lucky enough that my choice to write a thesis is entirely my own. I chose to attempt the monstrous not just to make up for my meek, single humanities major, nor simply in the hopes that the “Honors” designation on my degree would lower my chances of sponging off my parents for the next decade. Rather, I’m writing a thesis because I truly want to (“although who is it that wants when I want, what is the I, bla bla bla,” as my favorite Instagram artist @avocado_ibuprofen puts it).

I want to delve into a single subject so deeply that I’m able to produce fifty pages of writing about it. I crave to show myself that I can accomplish a task of this nature. I enjoy the idea of one day holding tangible proof of my hard work. When Umberto tells his students that writing a thesis is a great privilege, a soul-shaping experience of personal growth, I roll my eyes, but I believe him. Also, my thesis is about superhero movies, so I really can’t complain.

For better or worse, I could no longer dwell in the knowledge of the monster. I had to move on with my research and start reading the contents of my bibliography, a part of the process which has proven to be an emotional high point so far. Because the thesis proposal proceedings had taken place last spring and, therefore, had to be sandwiched into a full semester’s workload, I did not have the time to know the depths of my topic when I selected it.

Expecting a pool, I dove headfirst into the water and found myself in an ocean.

Unless you are completely uninterested in the subject of your thesis (in which case—why do you wish to torture yourself?) this chapter of the journey is bound to be electrifying. Even when you encounter, as you surely will, one of the occasional boring and/ or useless texts (they are not always one and the same), the task naturally lends itself to feeling both productive and entertaining. Learning is fun, but it is also usually accompanied by hard work: memorizing, analyzing, abstracting, regurgitating. This was not the case here, or at least it didn’t feel like it. The beast is large enough to give you months dedicated to learning only. Researching my topic makes me a happy little sponge, soaking up information to be used much later in the more arduous activity of actually drafting my argument. Consequently, I move (it is the chapter I still find myself in) in great strides and high spirits.

And yet, whenever I finish a reading and take a look at what is left to do before (gasp!) the first-draftof-first-chapter-deadline in December, the sense of doom returns. No matter how thoroughly I plan, how efficiently I manage my time, the monster won’t stop breathing down my neck. Even though I believe, tentatively, that this path I have drawn in the mist is the right one, and that I am far enough along on it, it seems impossible to see the future of my project right

now. Thanks to mentorship and a decent work ethic I know how this monumental task could, theoretically, be accomplished—but I am thoroughly unable to visualize the finished work.

To be sure, this is the nature of the beast.

Everyone’s Bachelor’s thesis is their first one, and as long as the year 2020 doesn’t somehow overturn the concept of time entirely, the future will remain unknowable to all of us. Nonetheless, we manage to give it some semblance of predictability every time we plan an event. My graduation this coming May, for example, has for years been a reliable signpost in the fog. Only graduation is now happening in April, and I don’t know whether it will be a pompous weekend of celebration or a pathetic little Zoom conference. I also don’t know if my family will be able to enter the U.S. to come see it, even if it does take place in the real world, nor do I know whether Prof. Dr. Thesis Advisor and I will ever meet in person again, and I don’t know which jobs to apply for this spring and maybe all of them just in case and wouldn’t it be better to go to grad school in this economy and do I even want to live in New England in this country on this continent?!

Ping. iMessage gently redirects my attention and I am reminded that I live in the present. The point is, looking into the future, even by as little as a month, feels like a task of enormous mental effort right now.

It’s pretty hard to see myself standing over the beast’s carcass in April.

In those moments when the white void of the Word document screams loudest, a strange thing happens. The beast turns around and smiles at me.

The world is burning and drowning and possibly going to fascist shit—but my thesis lives on in my laptop, waiting to be written, as millions of theses have been waiting to be written for what seems like millions of years. In those moments, the beast reminds me that the journey is not just a future accomplishment, but a present condition. I am right here, writing my thesis, and if I’m lucky, one day, I’ll have done much more interesting things than having weekly existential crises over what is mostly a learning exercise resulting in a very long and mediocre paper.

Fever Pitch

influenza A meets gossip girl

By Liza Edwards-Levin Illustrated by Sable Bellew During quarantine, the weekend starts when the first song is queued on our kitchen speaker. The music plays as my housemates and I assemble ingredients for dinner (pasta every Friday) and continues until we’ve dried the last dish: BØRNS, Frank Ocean, Glass Animals, Taylor Swift, HAIM…many songs prompt memories of moments that don’t make sense in a pandemic. Like Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” playing on a laptop freshman fall as 12 of us sat, cramped together on the floor of someone’s dorm room, awkward but determined not to show it—or, years later, my friend and I splitting his AirPods as the snow greeted us outside the GCB, “Thinkin Bout You” in his right ear and my left. The memories aren’t just mine: I can picture my housemates driving to see Bleachers at Milwaukee’s Summerfest over their birthday weekend two years ago, or rushing to catch the midnight train back to campus after a Maggie Rogers concert in Boston last fall. Crowded rooms, random gatherings, concerts—now off-limits, these settings have come to mean something new and different in retrospect. Listening to their soundtrack November 13, 2020 5

ARTS&CULTURE is the closest we can come to recreating them.

My house has been lucky enough to avoid Covid, but our Friday nights remind me of other situations where music and TV stood in for what I missed— getting the flu twice at Brown, both times impatient to return to normal, hectic campus life. With each passing sick day, weekend songs and TV drama helped bridge the gap between where I was and what I wished could happen. *** Stomach Virus I wasn’t at my high school desk anymore, where trick-or-treaters and their families would pass below the windows of our condo. Here, Halloween festivities lasted two, even three nights—a rush of last-minute costume shopping, pregames turned parties, lost jackets, and cold treks to crowded basements. I was Gossip Girl one night and a black cat the next, and both mornings my best friends and I reunited over coffee to reveal where the night had taken us just hours earlier.

But days after my first Halloweekend, I could barely get out of bed. I remember friends setting paper-towel-wrapped pieces of toast on my nightstand while my roommate stocked, then restocked, our mini-fridge with blue Gatorade. I remember how delicious saltines tasted, and the awkward, lengthy process of positioning myself so my stomach wouldn’t turn, stuffing extra pillows into the gap between my raised Twin XL bed and the cinderblock wall behind it. I remember one friend texting me, “I take it you’re not going out tonight?”—only half-joking. I felt better enough to stumble to the Ratty for a bowl of soup, then worse enough to receive IV fluid in the emergency room. It was a week and a half before I was on my feet again, remembering how it felt to walk across campus in my usual high-heeled boots.

The hardest part was sitting with myself: Between stumbling to and from Health Services, groggy visits from friends and calls with my parents, I spent most of each day alone, not well enough to focus but awake enough to worry. Whenever the virus spiked, leaving me feverish and demoralized, only my Halloweekend pregame playlist could keep me sane. The first few seconds of Migos’ “Stir Fry,” a flurry of cheers and whistles, took me to the entrance of a suite so crowded I’d needed to hold my friends’ hands to keep track of them. Chance the Rapper’s bouncy “All Night” made my best friend and I impatient as we scrambled to choose outfits, 15 minutes late for our destination: “Everybody outside, everybody outside / When I pull up outside all night long.” I rationed A$AP Rocky’s “Fashion Killa” for the lowest moments. In its final minute, the song enters a lighter, higher register, hovering in slow motion for 28 seconds before the beat returns to earth: “Bags and links, jeans and shoes

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/ Spikes and patent leathers, different fabrics mixed together / You and me, me and you / Go away together, we could get away forever…” Headphones in, pillows rearranged, and taking tiny sips of water in pajamas from the day before, I could almost feel myself waking up on the best kind of Saturday morning—half of me still in Friday night, my most recent memories glossing the day ahead, feeling at least temporarily ready for whatever might come next.

Influenza A “But I got the shot,” I said in weak defense when my doctor told me I’d tested positive for the flu last winter. It could happen anyway.

I’d turned 21 the week before, just old enough to opt for a GCB gin and tonic instead of fake-IDvodka chased with Ratty orange juice on a Friday night. By day 10 spent with my lights off and eyes halfclosed to fight back a headache that weighed down the rest of my body, I didn’t imagine my way back to a pregame. I longed for the busy days that had come to define my world at Brown: morning runs and evening tea, hours at the library between classes, back-to-back meals and meetings, endless plans to bring to life. In this schedule, free time was unfamiliar; I was almost never alone.

I rewatched five of Gossip Girl’s six seasons, depicting the drama-filled social lives of a group of extravagantly wealthy New York City teenagers (played by glamorous adults). Serena and Blair, the two best friends at the show’s center, navigate boyfriends, college applications, family tensions, and invariably action-packed trips to the Hamptons. The show’s world is far from real, but a feeling of realtime connectedness grounds each episode: Serena and Blair never seem to get the flu, yet they do laugh remembering their mishaps of the previous season.

Maybe most importantly, Gossip Girl characters hardly ever appear by themselves. Every nugget of made-for-TV gossip or convoluted plot twist is experienced—and debriefed—collectively. Sick with the flu, this is what I missed most—the collective feedback loop of everyday life, what one friend calls “conferencing with the cabinet.”

After the rest of my symptoms abated, my chest cough lingered: I couldn’t make it through a conversation or a five-minute walk without being racked by a post-viral coughing fit. I spent that week shadowed by fear that this limbo wouldn’t end…until, gradually, it did. One day, I made it to noon without thinking about coughing; by the next day, I barely remembered to be grateful. There was too much waiting to fill the space that my illness had occupied.

I’d be back at the Rock the next morning, bar hopping that Saturday night, my next favorite song playing or about to play.

*** I don’t miss being sick, but I do feel nostalgic for the life that surrounded each bout of college flu. My sick day songs of choice accompanied spontaneous, only-in-college-once adventures: nights that felt less like three-dimensional life and more like movie scenes or TV episodes, often featuring one-time guest stars. Yet both times I was sick, my regular cast of closest friends showed up for the tedious, unpolished scenes—the Health Services infirmary and Miriam Hospital emergency room on a Friday night, my blanket-littered dorm room where Pedialyte and cracker sleeves vied for space with a hot compress. When I received my positive flu test, the word quarantine didn’t enter my vocabulary; my friends were welcomed inside the hospital, no distancing required or even expected. Over an outdoor meal last week, a friend asked, “Liza, remember when you tested positive—for the flu?!”

We both laughed: we miss it.

The End of History grappling with uncertainty in turbulent times

By Zach Braner ILLUSTRATED BY Will Nussbaum In 1992, Andre Agassi beat Boris Becker in a five-set quarter-final at Wimbledon, before going on to win the tournament. That same year, Francis Fukuyama published an expanded version of his book-length essay, The End of History?, which argued that the fall of the Soviet Union signaled the final stage of human civilization: Now unopposed, liberal democratic ideals would prevail in former communist and authoritarian countries, and the world would finally reach equilibrium.

That might still happen, and I almost admire any scholar bold enough to risk the prediction. But these past years have taught me to shudder at claims that pretend to have mastered the chaos and uncertainty of the future at such windy heights, especially if the results seem optimistic. Then, in 2016, Fukuyama acknowledged that the present future had stumped his carefully constructed theoretical framework.

The phrase “The End of History?” doesn’t bring to mind a free or peaceful world— Fukuyama himself regarded his conclusions with mixed emotions—but, as a vague and sinister expression, it gives a name to an especially daunting future. Us non-theorists lay our claim on the future in subtler ways. When I hear things like, “history will look uncharitably upon this,” or, more specifically, “historians looking back at this period will throw up their hands in mute incomprehension at what took place in this country,” I notice only the assumption it slides under the fence: That there will be such a future. It presumes that, not too far off, there’s some stable era resembling the status quo we’ve lost—where wellrespected historians treat our volatile present with the same detachment reserved for the conquests of Genghis Khan.

But to me, “The End of History” implies a cataclysm so great that ‘history’—as a discipline— may not survive. It challenges me to imagine a world with nobody in that role, a level of institutional decay that causes ivory towers to crumble. We rely on historians, wisely or not, to vindicate our experience of the present—to tell our story and immortalize our struggles in the annals of human achievement (re: Hamilton). I’ve heard the argument that for many secular people, history represents the closest thing to an afterlife, and the judgment of clear-eyed observers in the distant future serves as the watchful

ARTS&CULTURE eye of god. But historical thinking also promises a sort of continuity—that we, the present, are but one part of a larger story. It’s not easy to imagine, and much harder to face, that there is no trustworthy authority, waiting somewhere down the line, to speak for us.

I found myself reflecting on the uncertain future (along with everybody else) due to a recent, extreme episode. Last week, the future shrunk to a few hours beyond which everything important seemed in doubt. Working on assignments due the next day felt pointless with so much on the line. But the future’s been getting shorter all my life, and the world is accelerating toward uncertainty along so many axes, that questions like “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”—already silly—now strike me as absurd. I know this is not the first generation to come of age in a time of broken precedents and mounting existential threats—I still remember a video they showed us in high school of a radio announcer telling American schoolchildren in the 1950s to hide under their desks in case of nuclear attack—but the nature of today’s uncertainty makes telling yourself “Well, it’s happened before” pretty cold comfort. The investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb made his millions betting daily on events considered so improbable they’re treated as impossible (so-called Black Swans) and cashing in when the market unexpectedly crashed, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the 2008 housing crash. The belief that the future will be like the past, that history repeats itself, is a well-known bit of circular logic, but it’s impossible to live without.

Instead, with the help of another thinker on the endpoint of civilization, I’ve tried to reconcile myself with a fickle future.

H.G. Wells invented the modern practice of imagining uncertain futures, and on Christmas 1897 he published a story called “The Star.” In barely ten pages, a foreign star careens into Neptune before being flung by Jupiter’s gravity into the sun. From the perspective of the Solar System, it’s a decidedly unusual event—unprecedented, even, in the four and a half billion years since the birth of the planets.

When it’s over, there’s a missing planet and the orbits of a few others have been slightly altered. From the perspective of the human race, though, it’s a final reckoning. Wells describes the tiny spot of light first appearing in the New Year’s night sky, then reappearing larger the next night, until: “It rose over America near the size of the moon, but blinding white to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew now with a rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence Valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunderclouds, flickering violet

lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid and soon—in their upper reaches—with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the flying population of their valleys.”

Wells delivers the destruction of human civilization with grace. His tone is cool, detached, as he unfolds how one process, simpler but set in motion billions of years earlier, extinguishes another—the development and growth of human civilization over mere millennia. In the final nights of their lives, most disregard the possibility of death—“use and wont still ruled the world.” But it goes no differently for those that fret. The only character mentioned more than once is a “master mathematician,” who, having laboriously calculated the damning significance of the collision, calmly presents the results to his students, and then the world.

The therapeutic power of Wells’ story comes from the simple recognition that there are circumstances beyond anybody’s control. This almost trivial realization feels, at least for now, like enough to me because of how Wells portrays those forces: As a great and terrible cosmic symphony, in which our part is so small we cannot fathom the whole. I suddenly find I don’t mind relinquishing myself—fears, hopes, and all—for a grateful moment of awe.

The key to Wells’ success is his brevity: No one can hold the scale of interplanetary action in their mind for long, but for those ten pages Wells sweats to

“I’ve literally sat down with a therapist and traced the origin of all my self-confidence to a rapturously received AXE Body Spray joke I made in my sixth-grade English class.”

—Julian Towers, “my parents don't think i'm funny” 11.15.19

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo a FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin Section Editors Alice Bai Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Olivia Howe

“The recent rain has given the world outside a dull hue, incentivizing my reluctance to return to studying and stress.”

—Sydney Lo, “YA fantasy meeting reality” 11.9.18

Section Editors Maddy McGrath Emma Schneider

sustain the illusion. There is no protagonist and no rescue effort, no sudden coming together or resolving of differences. It’s not really about us so much as it’s about that immensity which gave rise to us, and which will continue hereafter. Wells writes, “the sun, with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swim in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination.”

The solace a story like “The Star” provides is powerful, but impermanent. This realization of our role in the universe will soon be trampled underfoot by the onrush of days, demands, and losses that seem in their own way enduring. Knowing that entropy will one day still the breadth of existence doesn’t help me figure out how to act in the world. And the stoic certainty it imbues in a seeking reader like myself is easily dispatched by some more skeptical strains of philosophy. The true terror of the future is the fact that its unpredictability “defeats the imagination.”

Which brings me back to the 1992 Wimbledon quarter-final, Agassi vs. Becker. I know nothing about tennis, but I love this match. It’s a triumph of people imposing order on their world and their future, wrestling doubt-ridden human reality onto straight lines totally bounded by clear rules. It’s also great entertainment—a riveting narrative, each player straining to their breaking point into an unexpected fifth set. But whereas history will try to convince you of some certainty to carry you forward (or ask you to convince yourself of a narrative), this match just has a winner. It ends. I’ll probably never reach certainties with respect to life’s biggest questions, including how to face the future, but I know who won the game. I saw the whole thing, from start to finish.

And I’m grateful for that.

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Jasmine Ngai Section Editors Siena Capone Minako Ogita Christina Vasquez LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney Section Editors Kimberly Liu Emily Wang

COPY CHIEF Mohima Sattar Copy Editors Laura David Kyoko Leaman Aditi Marshan Eleanor Peters SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Tessa Devoe

CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Joanne Han Iris Xie Layout Designers Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen WEB MASTER Amy Pu

STAFF WRITERS Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Editors Eashan Das Julia Gubner Danielle Emerson Kyra Haddad Jordan Hartzell Jolie Rolnick Nicole Kim Chloe Zhao Gus Kmetz HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Elliana Reynolds Gaby Treviño Victoria Yin

Want to be involved?

Email: amanda_ngo@brown.edu!

November 13, 2020 7