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Three Things That Kept Me Sane in 2020

John Micek on

The end of this sad, strange, historic and transformative year is almost upon us. And like a lot of you, I found myself burrowing into ritual, structure, and obligatory loaves of sourdough to fill up those hours of social isolation thrust upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But of course, you can’t live on pandemic sourdough alone. So here’s a quick list of the books, music, and bits of culture that provided some peace and tranquility amidst the frantic hours of work, moments of mourning, and surprising intervals of joy and extreme gratitude that made up my 2020.

“1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed,” Eric H. Kline, Princeton University Press

When you’re staring down what feels like the end of history, it’s only natural to wonder if we’ve been here before, and what lessons those times of trouble hold for us now.

This slender, but massively weighty volume, by George Washington University classicist Eric H. Cline, takes up one of the great mysteries of human history. In 1177 B.C., after centuries of brilliance, the civilizations of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Over the space of a generation or so, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Hittites, and the Babylonians, slid into irreversible decline, vanishing from history, as the region slid into a centuries-long dark age that didn’t end until the emergence of what we now know as the classical era around 750 B.C.

Historians are still trying to unravel the interconnected calamities, which ranged from incursions by seaborne groups of marauders collectively known as the “Sea Peoples” and internal unrest, to the severing of sophisticated regional trade routes, that hastened the end of the Late Bronze Age. While it’s a very foreign world in a lot of ways, it’s also one that is recognizably our own, reminding us that civilization is a delicate thing that needs to be tended to and nurtured if it is to survive.

 

“Folklore,” Taylor Swift

For all the ink that’s been spilled about the death of the monoculture, July’s surprise release of Taylor Swift’s ninth record was a throwback to those seemingly bygone years where we were all listening to, and dissecting, the same records at the same time.

The minimalist, folk-imbued electronica that Swift crafted in lockdown with The National’s Aaron Dessner, and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, was just the sort of quiet escapism that we were all looking for as we came blinking into the sun of what ended up being a short-lived, post-lockdown world.

Sometimes the right record comes along at the right moment. Swift, ever adept at choosing her moments, found hers with “Folklore.”

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Copyright 2020 John Micek, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com

 

 

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