Katherine May - Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Lately I wake in the night and a few panicked seconds pass in which I cant locate myself. I could tell you my name, certainly, but not which version of me Im dealing with.

Once, I was sure I was back in my teenage bed. I could almost hear the creak of its metal frame as I ticked over my timetable in my head: science, history, art. Unstable reality that it was, the illusion dissipated, and for a few floundering moments I was no one at all, just someone who remembered being that girl. Then I was me again, the me that exists now, in my blue upholstered bed with sea air surging through the window.

That was unusual. Mostly I am nobody when I wake up, just a consciousness in the darkness trying to piece it all together. It is a strange, free-floating moment, an unanchoring of the self. It is an interlude, like held breath. Eventually it releases, the lungs fill, the world floods in. A reassuring upload of facts. A reboot. I am back.

Lately I cant read a whole page of a book. It is frictionless, this sliding of attention. I thought it would resolve once the lockdowns ended, but it did not. Its as if some kind of lubrication has been applied to my choices. I intend to do one thing, but my unconscious shunts me discreetly away. It has other plans for me. I am supposed to be watching. I am supposed to be looking over my shoulder, alert to the next threat.

I do not stop buying books. People do not stop sending them to me. The books become menacing, teetering on every table in the house, massing like the disenfranchised before a riot. Stacked by my desk, they gather alarming cauls of dust.

I resolve to build more bookshelves, but that project, too, eludes me. I am too busy watching, after all. I cannot spare the attention that would absorb.

Lately my hands itch to be occupied. I take down the hems of Berts school trousers and pin them back in place. There is no sense in buying a new pair. They will barely last the month.

He is growing so fast. I can no longer haul him onto my lap and enfold him in my arms. We make, between us, a rough approximation of it, but there are always limbs astray, and one of us ends up writhing in discomfort. We both crave it, the heft of his body against mine, but we are overbalanced now. We sit side by side instead, trying to relive the memory of contact.

So I busy myself with hems, remembering how I first learned this, sewing washrags on bored summer holiday afternoons. My grandmother would watch my overeager little hands and tell me that stitches are placed and not pulled. I must not pull too hard, but neither must I let the thread fall slack. I wonder if pins might be the answer to all my straying. Perhaps I can place careful stitches to hold me in place.

The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though weve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.

If there were a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear. For years now weve been running like rabbits. We glimpse a flash of white tail, read the danger signal, and run, flashing our own white tail behind us. Its a chain reaction, a river of terror surging incoherently onwards, gathering up other wild, alert bodies who in turn signal their own danger. There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.

Everything about this time conspires to make us feel so very small. Its as though the scale of things has overtaken us. The teetering numeric weight of the world has been revealed, and its like looking into the face of God: we are blasted by its terrible complexity, its stark enormity. Nothing could have prepared us for this. We are working now to maintain the basics of survival. It is an endless, thankless labour. It sometimes feels as though we are stoking a giant machine that will eventually consume us anyway. We are tired. We are the deep bone-tired of people who no longer feel at home. We can see no way out of it.