FOUR YEARS LATER

What we can't learn from 2020.

- ADAM GOPNIK

Which were the pivotal years of the past century? An argument could be made for 1929, when the worldwide financial crash ushered in the crisis that led to the rise of Nazism (and of the New Deal) and, eventually, to the Second World War; for 1945, when the United States emerged from that war uniquely victorious having, like Hercules, strangled two serpents in its cradle, as Updike thought and in possession of the most lethal weapon the world had ever known; for 1968, marked by a series of assassinations and domestic unrest that announced the beginning of the end of the American bulwark empire but also, through the awakening to liberation and the soft power of the European left, of the Russian one. Other years raise their hands eagerly and ask for admittance: 1979, with the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ayatollah Khomeini and the war in Afghanistan; 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall; 2001, with its terrorism and counterterrorism. But 2020, the year when a virus came out of China and shut down the world, gets in by acclamation.

Writing the history of an event that happened generations ago is difficult enough. (The 1968 movements in Paris and elsewhere seemed leftist at the time but actually marked the break of young radicals with the Communist Party.) Writing about an episode that happened five minutes ago is hard in another way. Who knows what counts and what doesn't? Yet 2020 already seems historichow remote so many of its rituals now feel, from the Lysol scrubbing of innocent groceries to the six-feet rule of social distancing. Andrew Cuomo and Joe Exotic, both superstars of the first pandemic months, have been banished from attention. We speculated about how New York City would emerge from the pandemic: traumatized or merry or newly chastened and egalitarian? Now the city is back, and little seems changed from the way things were when normal life stopped in mid-March of 2020.