Pollens and the daily life

This air filter is my best friend right now. Tree pollen is affecting me violently this year.

The need to stay inside and breathe filtered air gives me an excuse (if I ever need an excuse) to read. I’m buried in the correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends. They wrote frequently to each other from 1949 to 1975 when Arendt died, about their work and relationships but also about people and events I know only from the news and from literature classes. Arendt tells McCarthy “just for you, remember,” that the preceding night, just twenty days after Arendt’s husband died and while she was in deep mourning, W.H. Auden dropped in on her, looking like a vagrant, drunk and maudlin, wanting her help securing an academic position. She feels that helping him would be “worse than suicide,” and she pities him.

I miss letter-writing, now that we have social media, email, text messages, and phone calls: less considered, less likely to be saved. Arendt and McCarthy didn’t imagine their letters would be saved (let alone published), but they took time writing and thinking. Letters were helpful for reflection and self-examination, for bearing witness to another’s mundane concerns. How do we self-reflect now? This is why I love the Blip journals that chronicle daily life, detailed and specific. Nothing is more profound than daily life. This is what our lives are made of: not the high and low, not the turning points, but the quiet choices we make each day.