The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Jack Wilson and this is the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. That is, this is, whoa, where are we? This is that Twilight Week, isn't it? At least for me it is. Christmas is right behind us, New Year's is right ahead.

How are you spending these days? I usually work a few of them and then I get so exasperated

by work when everyone else is on leave that I take it off.

In non-pandemic years, my family and I would go to the beach, which I absolutely love,

staying there in the winter, we stay in a hotel that has a kind of Christmas

hangover feel and a definite off-season feel. It's a new hotel right on the beach and in the summer months we wouldn't even be able to afford a single

night at that place it would blow our entire budget maybe we could afford an hour.

We came around the 4th of July, but now it's winter and much of the beach is closed and

there aren't hundreds of people baking in the sun and swimming in the surf.

Instead, it's a lot of locals a few hearty couples or lone

individuals with dogs and us flying kites in near hurricane conditions which is actually a pretty good time to fly a kite

it's dramatic and effective and we have the beach to ourselves there's usually a

biting wind but sometimes there are periods of calm and the sky is light, if not actually sunny, and it's

gorgeous. The ocean is choppy and gorgeous. I love it, maybe next year. There's a lot of that this year, a lot of saying maybe next year,

maybe next year we can do that, maybe things will be better. We're at one of those

moments where the present feels frozen in time suspended and we have a before

and an after all the befores live in our memories and all the afters are still to come, still full of hope and promise. I've had a few periods

like this in my lifetime when the Berlin Wall fell there was a before and an after, when the

towers fell at 9-11 there was a before and an after and now we have a couple the Trump administration might be one

This pandemic might be another there will be a, there will be an after, only this time it feels

less like a moment and more like time is frozen, a long suspension of time. It feels different this time. And so we look to the past and look to the future.

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