It's been 12 months since I started Night Toast, and by no design, this happens to be newsletter #12 since October of last year. As much as I would love to say that this number reflects a regular monthly publishing schedule, the reality is that I write when I can, and publish when I feel brave enough to let go of the infinity of things I want to change. (Which is to say, erratically.) But the evenness of that number is meaningful to me. Night Toast has become something of a personal time capsule for one of the wildest years I've ever known. It contains November's election night steeped in heady anticipation, then the blunt shock of January's insurrection, and of course, the persistent oddities and indignities of life under the coronavirus pandemic.
I guess my first order of business here is to say thank you for reading Night Toast and for sticking with me through this year. This project has connected me to people who make me feel hopeful and expansive even under the most confining conditions. It has opened up opportunities for collaboration despite the atomizing designs of the Internet and this year writ large. And in that sense, it's fulfilled every wish I had when I started it: that Night Toast could be a place to slow down, to make space for ideas that are sometimes hard to describe, and, in some small way, make sense of the ordinary chaos that shapes modern life. I hope it has given you something to keep.
The first piece I ever wrote here was about returning to old places or ideas, having changed in some way. Tonight's newsletter in some ways is about the same thing. It explores the relationship between past and present specifically during an era which feels marked by a sense of accelerating catastrophe. With every climate disaster and economic recession we live through, the paradigm of normalcy tilts a little further away from what it was before. How does affect our relationship to the recent past? And what does it do to our memories?
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I came across an article around time of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 called “A Time Capsule In Two Front Pages,” which compares two copies of the New York Times published before and after the attack. The paper printed on the morning of September 11th before the towers fell features a large colorful image of a bustling crowd outside a Fashion Week event. In the photo, people are carrying shopping bags and looking idly at their phones. It shows a certain mundanity that mirrors the tone of the adjacent headlines: “In A Nation of Early Risers, Morning TV Is A Hot Market” and, “School Dress Codes vs. A Sea of Bare Flesh” (y i k e s). The headlines on the front page the following day, having caught up with the horror of 9/11, reflect what feels to me like a more recognizable modern norm: the apocalyptic images, the all-caps typeface that's at once too neutral and too alarming. “Side by side, front pages on Sept. 11, 2001, left, and, on Sept. 12, 2001, show a world changed” a caption of the two images reads.
A around that same time, an Instagram account I follow called @90sanxiety shared an image of a German woman named Isabel Daser who reportedly was unaware of the attacks when she a coworker to take her photograph in downtown Manhattan. The photo shows Daser pregnant, gazing at the camera serenely while smoke billows from the World Trade Center in the background. The image has appeared in Vanity Fair and in several other syndicated round-ups showing “haunting” 9/11 images on the likes of Bored Panda and Reddit. The captions almost always point out Daser's ignorance at the time. Troublingly, a Globe and Mail article refers to the woman by a different name, Isabel Bessler, and reports that she was aware of the burning towers when the photograph was taken, contradicting another Globe and Mail interview where she suggests that she didn't. In any case, the Internet has largely adopted the little-did-she-know framing of the image. Whether or not this is true, I have no idea, but I do get the sense that this framing is exactly why the photo is so captivating and reproducible online. It's the same mechanism that powers so much viral content, like homecoming videos of veterans surprising their families or college acceptance videos on YouTube. (Culture writer Amanda Hess calls this the YouTubeization of dramatic irony.) As viewers, we know what the outcome will be; we watch because of the emotional tension between the subject's ignorance and our own knowledge of what's to come.
The pandemic, in the way that disasters do, produced a before-time and an after-time. Like the two NYT front pages that delineate “a world changed,” the pandemic has left behind accidental time capsules in its wake, too. Last spring, I remember walking by advertisements in the subway for movie premieres and Broadway shows that never happened. The posters become faded and tattered since they were wheat-pasted nearly a year before, and I felt almost embarrassed that they were still up. I've also recently been reading my old journal entries from the beginning of the pandemic, consuming them not unlike the way the Internet consumes eerie or uncanny images taken right before the 9/11 attacks.
“It’s the spectacle, I think, that makes a disaster a disaster,” Elisa Gabbert writes in her essay, Magnificent Desolation. “A disaster must not only blindside us, but be witnessed and witnessed in public.” The prevalence phone photography and first-person accounts on social media amplify this witnessing, which Gabbert claims this may even create a kind of cultural demand for disaster. Her theory might explain why during the first weeks of lockdown, pandemic documentaries and movies like Contagion took up the prime real estate on Netflix's homepage because they were so popular. Even when we ourselves are affected by disaster, we’re addicted to its dramatic irony — and our own role in it. “Horror and awe are not incompatible; They are intertwined” Gabbert writes.
Maybe this is why relics from immediately before a cataclysmic event are so intriguing. The Internet has latched on to Isabel Daser's photo, I think, because it feels like something real enough to hold. There is an unreality to mass disaster as it happens, like it's an impenetrable experience you can only witness from outside yourself. Sometimes representations of disaster can feel more real than the disaster itself. When I watch a scene of a large crowd in a movie, I still tense up. You probably do it too, noticing the lack of hand-washing or masks or the faded antiquity of any scene involving an office. It's like my physiology knows the narrative arc; I carry the knowledge of this pandemic quite literally in my body. I know how the story ends, and still, I'm just sitting here. Daser’s photo is this same kind of representation — the critical moment suspended in amber before the world changed in incomprehensible ways.
Memory in the digital age is a funny thing. On one hand, we use technology as a crutch to outsource what we would usually store in our heads, and then in turn, our phones bombard us with irrelevant past memories to a truly annoying degree.
On this day, 10 years ago, you took a basic photo of your cappuccino and decided it was a good idea to share with the world!
Please Facebook, I respond, let me live in peace. This is humiliating! I say, as I get served another ad for a new brand of oat mylk.
“Past NYC memories still lurking in my camera roll, how rude!!” I wrote in a caption on Instagram in April 2020 along with a series of photos and videos of ordinary pre-pandemic moments. It had only been a few weeks of lockdown when I posted it, but things were already very bad. Even then, my instinct was to reach for the before-time, to revisit the moment before it all changed and hold it in my hands. When I look back at this caption, I think to myself a phrase that's become a hallmark of post-lockdown small talk. It’s a phrase I’m sure I thought to myself when I posted the Instagram the first place — like a Russian doll effect that never ends: if only we knew.