Our Own Private Era

the secret club you already belong to

Dear ones,

Of all the differences between us (those we unearth and those we invent), we have one MASSIVE thing in common. You reading this, me writing it, all our friends.

We are all sharing this particular instant in the history of the planet. Right now. You and me. Right here. This moment belongs to all of us.

Think about how rare that is. So many folks have been and gone, never overlapping our time; they can never know what we know. Same with those who will come after us. CLUELESS.

I majored in history, and I definitely have a tendency to think of human life on the planet in a past-present-future continuum. I can forget about the great vastness of the present. And how precious it is.

Think about the secrets we share, those of us huddled here together in this great big Now. The things we understand that no one else will ever know like those of us who have touched the skin of the earth at this very moment.

In this time, many of us are grappling with the same concerns. What does it mean that technology has made us so interconnected? How can we reconcile the human race’s general indifference to climate crisis? In my adopted country we’re gripped this week in the implications of (yet another) horrifying murder of a Black American at the hands of the police.*

I wonder if these are the issues that will be remembered as the defining features of this era. We can’t know—and to a large extent it kind of depends what happens next. As the great bard of this age Ani DiFranco has written, “what happened always adjusts/ to fit what happened after that.”

It’s easy to casually define what’s notable about past eras. The roaring 1920s and the “interwar period” more generally (a term that we can only, obviously, apply in retrospect. For those living in it, it was post-war; hurray!). The Reconstruction period. The Great Depression.

Those who lived through these times shared an intimacy that we can never come close to imagining. And as divided and far-flung as we are, this is true for us too.

It’s cool to live in a moment. You know? To share the cultural shorthand offered by the internet, the media, our deliciously shifting dialects and the very taste of the language we use. The ellipses that are created in cartoons and jokes that can only be filled by triangulating different layers of knowledge of our time. The reward that this kind of humor brings.

I love that there’s a sinuous movement in the right now that is so powerful when compared with the shimmering veil that is the future, or the archaic serifs of the past’s fading newsprint. Like feeling a big snake’s muscles moving beneath your hand. That’s what it is to be in the now.

(And so in conclusion, Your Honor, this is how I justify spending so much time reading Prince Harry’s book in the past two weeks.)

Love,

Ro

*Important note about this letter 👆

Friends, I drafted this piece before Tyre Nichols’s murder. It’s amazing how differently it reads following that event. So I need to be super clear about what I’m trying to say here. I’m not claiming that people have identical (or even similar) experiences because they live at the same time. The past week in the USA has shown us that. So this letter is not about erasing or denying inequality. In fact, I believe that recognizing the commonality in sharing an era is part of taking accountability for what is unjust in our time. Who’s going to change it if not us? The dead? The not-yet-born? No. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. xR

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Recommended Reading

I loved Courtney Maum’s piece “Don’t Write Every Day” so much I actually printed it. In the spirit of my “(Kind) Rules for Writers,” Courtney points out that

“Telling someone—especially someone who is spending money on their writing instead of earning money from it—that they need to “write every day” is basically the same thing as saying “be rich.” It’s classist advice. It’s naive. It’s infeasible.”

The other thing I LOVED about this article is that Courtney includes her own weekly schedule for writing her principle project alongside everything else that is “work” for a working writer. If you’re interested in writing and/or publishing, this is such a great Substack to subscribe to.

Don't write every day