The poet Robert Graves wrote of life in the trenches during WW1, “noise never stopped for one moment – ever.” This year feels a bit like that. It’s the screaming that comes across the sky in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Vulnerabilities have been exposed by trade tensions, a highly charged political climate, and now a global pandemic. Though our circumstance falls short of war, 2020 is a cacoph- ony of dire news headlines, Zoom meetings, and we can’t get on an airplane to escape ourselves.
