"Free for What, Darling?"
Love letters penned in the Second World War offer surprising insights into the nature of time and the vicissitudes of social media.
By Joel Cuthbertson
When lockdowns began in March 2020, everyone was suddenly having the same day, and it was the kind that never ended. “Can you believe last week was twenty-three years ago?” appeared on social media in some form almost immediately, and accurately. Various tweets and posts on this theme were shared and re-shared, many of us digitally nodding along. “Yes,” we double-tapped. “Same. Here.” The time-wobble went beyond social media, too. I heard similar sentiments from offline family, from those working and not working—what day was it again? Only the iPhones knew.
Of course, how an hour or a minute or a month lands internally is always agreeing and disagreeing with clocks, the sun, train schedules, and physicists. Time’s arrow lengthens, shortens, and dies when we die. Maybe. Time flies. In 2020, time took acid. What was most compelling about time’s distortions last year was the semi-universality of the phenomenon. Not just that we were all disrupted, but that the distortions jutted in the same direction for so many people. I mean, is anyone willing to argue that April 2020 felt shorter than September 2020? As far as I can remember it was March right until it was June, and the day after August it was Thanksgiving.
The time-wobbles were particularly salient for me. I gave notice to my job in January 2020, and my last day was March 12. My work shut down two days after I quit. My plan to stay home with my young children, already an experiment in time-distortion, was immediately pitched into its sharpest key. I wasn’t simply at home, I was solely at home. At one point, the parks—the actual playgrounds!—were closed. My two-year-old began resisting our daily walk sometime in May, which was hard to fault. We’d been doing little else for, oh, seventeen years or so by that point.
Like many, I removed the screen-time governor. I had the phone out all day, and longer sometimes. My screen habits became so mindless I can’t actually recall the specific emollient of news, Twitter, and longform escapism I devised almost overnight. My kids watched more Daniel Tiger, I watched enough Columbo that AARP still has their eye on me, and to make it all worse I didn’t give myself or anyone else a break morally. I’ve often tried to shed social media, my smart phone, and more, and I’ve been triumphant in half-measures when the full-bore efforts have failed to hit glorious, Amish pay dirt. But when the lockdowns came, I joined the rest of the U.S. in my own tech-addled Rumspringa.
And yet—those Twitter jokes were amazing. If social media is designed to dehumanize us, to reduce our complexities in the name of others’ consumption, it is most casually degrading when we internalize the forms. We think in tweets, we pose like Instagram posts, we censor what the invisible mob in our minds reminds us will be damning if said in the wrong tone. But the pandemic restricted the range of life in a way that made social media, however deceptively and for however short a time, feel more dynamic, more genuine. The grief and fear and frustration of the moment was shared. The voices of my friends, of other humans likewise trapped in their houses, easily reached me. The dangerous homogenizing of the internet, the way we’re encouraged to reach warp-speed consensus and erect warp-speed battle-lines, offered a sense of warp-speed togetherness.
But the opposite was also true. Social media was never better, and never worse, than the last year. One of the reigning consequences of the pandemic has been to press a thumb on the scales of every major, minor, and personal tension. For every joke or friendly exchange, the timeline offered a thousand ways to self-inject the usual social media brain poison. Think little, but angrily, and repeat every generalization about a literal world of impossible moral conundrums. What’s wrong with us? Does the good of logging on outweigh the bad, or at least balance it? Is the addiction metaphor (diagnosis) enough to explain our compulsive scanning of Facebook, Reddit, TV news, or TikTok? And if so, addiction to what?
The pandemic made clear that social media and maybe all media habits—your romance novels and your submarine series as well as Instagram and MSNBC—are a battle with time. Vanity and vulgarity and other factors are involved, yes. But I also think we’re addicted to the loss of time, to hoisting ourselves over the rim of Netflix and keg-standing whatever latest teen-detective banality will pause the clock.
This isn’t simply “wasting time,” but an impulse to control time and even, just for a few moments, obliterate it. Killing time, but not wistfully. Not kicking your heels and humming, but fastening time to a sterile gurney and ethering the hours until time, its presence inside oneself, is suspended. If time-wasting amounts to the same activities, it doesn’t amount to the same experience. The opposite of wasting time is time well-spent, time made profitable, but the opposite of time obliterated is time eternal. I flinch at the idea that retweets might have anything to do with a kind of corrupted transcendence, a timelessness that self-annihilates; it seems a bit overstated. But the pandemic pressurized the way we already avoided, accepted, resisted, and pacified time, especially where screens were concerned. Besides, we’re mysterious all the way down, even to our Facebook posts—we’re the ape that worships. As such, I want to pin the issue of time embodied and timelessness pursued to our recent experience, and to a prophet of our recent experience, a wit who clarifies what it felt like in 2020 to be more and less online than ever.
For many of us, the only social condition that could rival the early months of isolation was the early months of never-being-alone, which happened at exactly the same time.
Enter Eileen Alexander. She’s dead, but relevant. (Every writer’s dream.) During my solo outings last year to stare at the sun, or sometimes the moon, I began listening to Alexander’s collected WWII love letters. Published as Love in the Blitz in 2020, they’re as delectable as their title is emetic. Living in London in the 1930s and 40s, Alexander records her struggles and hopes and witticisms in an avalanche of missives that can only be called “posting too much.” Her beloved, Gershon, is in the army and initially stationed in England, but eventually sent abroad to Egypt. At home or away, though, he’s drowned in her love letters. We’re told in the book’s introduction that an initial, partial collection of only half the total letters spans some 1,600 pages. Reduced to general-interest size, the book remains hefty at nearly 500 pages—Eileen Alexander, the ur-queen of tweeting through it.
Here, of course, is where I tell you how prescient Love in the Blitz proved while reading it during lockdown. You’ve heard this tale before. Camus’s The Plague, Stephen King’s The Stand, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, and more. Covid-19 descended on the Western world and a large chunk of the internet responded by making reading lists. Even if one avoided the lists, the pertinence of plagues and social upheaval was mentally invasive. I’d pick up Denis Johnson, Tove Jansson, or James Baldwin and I’d see our isolation, our spiritual unstitching, our political eruptions anticipated and cataloged. 2020 didn’t simply annex the near future (what is 2021, if not 2020 persevering?), it also reached into our reading and overlaid what was salient about the past, even the fake past.
But the relevance of Alexander’s letters is more intimate than most other fare. By the accident of a London auction house and the good sense of her editors, her collection has survived to present us the mind in waiting. She and her fiancé, Gershon, share a car crash (Gershon’s fault), and then she waits for him to show concrete, romantic interest. She’s hoping to return to Cambridge when the war breaks out and she waits on Girton College for re-matriculation. It doesn’t happen, and she waits for a job. She grows closer with Gershon and waits for him to propose. The war comes to London and she waits for her parents to stop needling her out of bed during air raids. She waits for her friends’ letters, for a transfer to more useful civil servitude, for Gershon to go abroad, for the war to end, for Gershon to come home—she waits and waits for his return above all. His intentions secured, her letters lose some of their hedging tone, but she is still waiting for their life to begin, for consummation on every level.
There’s a tension to her waiting in that she is busier and with more purpose than she’s ever been before. Life is well under way! Yet from 1939 to 1944 most of her free time is spent in anticipation. Her orientation is always forward. The editors have reinforced this theme by titling the largest batch of letters “The Long Wait.” The section immediately before they dub “Limbo,” and before “Limbo” it’s “Separation.” A little not-getting with your not-yetting, as a treat, and only then does The Long Wait begin. Eileen Alexander waits, and does so in a sort of cramped isolation anyone living through the last year and a half might recognize. “There’s no place in the world that one is so suffocated by Family as in an Air Raid Shelter,” she writes early in her and Gershon’s relationship. “I pretended to go to sleep in an endeavor to Escape—but there they were—Everywhere.”
With her humor and her compulsive need to render all her life in miniature for Gershon, she captures the paradoxes of lockdown. Never more alone, Alexander is also never more under her parents’ feet, and it’s clear they feel the same about her. She describes her brothers rarely, but when the youngest appears it’s usually as a torment. She’s criticized for being sad about her fiancé who might die at war, and her father comes to tears at least once with regard to her back-talk. (She’s in her twenties.) She doesn’t take the air raids seriously (anti-mask Eileen!), except of course she does. Who can deny the dangers of bombing when, as with her, your place of work is destroyed overnight? The neighbors receive an unexploded bomb in the garden, at one point, and her family practices fire drills in the dark of night. But she resists the shelter now and then because after so much effort all day, every day, the inconvenience does, actually, feel like it might be worse than death. I could say the same about hand sanitizer. What, germaphobes, is wrong with soap?
For many of us, the only social condition that could rival the early months of isolation was the early months of never-being-alone, which happened at exactly the same time. I was without friends and family in a way I’ve almost never experienced, to say nothing of fellow church-goers or librarians, and yet all I wanted was a few minutes to myself. My children were always with me, and one of them seemed to think we should talk! I was never busier while at the same time never more bored than this last year. Partly that’s the experience of all parents with young children, but those parents usually hang with friends now and then. I effectively didn’t see anyone outside the house for the first two months of staying home full-time with my two kids, one of whom was less than a year old. The quantity of life was increased, even overwhelming, but flattened—an expanse.
The letters are active waiting, are pointed not only at the future’s promise of reunion but an effort to instantiate some sense of that future now.
In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor insists that time, in the modern world, “has been in a sense ‘spatialized.’” He emphasizes how we, by default, accept time as homogeneous, as stretching out along one plane. Our sense of time is horizontal. This is in contrast to earlier ages, when our ancestors understood time “to have been always multi-dimensional.” It’s impossible to squeeze even a single idea of Taylor’s into a non-reductive summary, but his example that “Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997,” does as good a job as any. There’s a way in which eternity, of which time is only “a moving image,” is glimpsed by the narrative-making of events ritually co-existing across the ages.
There are endless ways to misuse this idea. It can be reduced to resonance, for one, and wielded as the world’s largest, most unnecessary critical hammer. “I liked this book! Isn’t that just Eternity for you!” But Alexander’s letters are fundamentally about time. The letters are her way of stepping out of time—whether at work, at home, or in a shelter, she puts pen to paper and glimpses the utopia of her life to come. The letters are active waiting, are pointed not only at the future’s promise of reunion but an effort to instantiate some sense of that future now.
To this end, her daily writing re-shapes her lived time into narrative. The qualifying “daily” matters. Her weeks have the ordinary form of event C after event B after event A, but every single day is purposefully reorganized. That’s what all meaning-making does. Assigning causation is just close-reading chronology. Day after day she mentally shrinks some hours and enlarges others for the benefit of Gershon, her own sanity, and of course the day to come. A tedious chat with her “Pa,” for example, is rendered into a punchline: “Damn! Pa has come in to talk about Him & Leslie—it looks like an all-evening session.” What was insufferable becomes pithy. The work of memory is made explicit, hours here and there taken out of the stream of time and sometimes honored, sometimes minimized; a hierarchy, rather than a level plane.
I’ll go further, though: The letters Alexander wrote during the Blitz brought her and me into temporal contact. We have marketing language for these experiences. Her letters were relevant to the moment. Her letters were timeless, witty enough to be enjoyed at all moments. Her letters went deep enough that they reminded me of my mother, how she thinks and teases and attracts confessions and gab by her mere presence, and how such traits were both illuminated and dulled by lockdown. Most odd, Alexander’s letters reminded me again and again of social media.
First, there are the tics of style. She litters her phrases with the evolutionary forefathers of our own social gimmicks. She loves Odd Capitalization for Seemingly Humorous Reasons. Coherent, intelligent, her writing is nevertheless a jumble of usage rules which all somehow make sense. “His cousin Charles had decided to get married. I said oh! wasn’t that rather surprising? – to which he replied Yes and No.” She comments on the banal as well as the profound in the name of sending as many letters as possible and in the name of amusing. Is there anyone posting with real vim who does differently? She’s even the first person to zoologically identify a Wife-Guy: “Charles is bursting with my-wifery.” Her sketch of the poor wife in question, what’s more, is a thread to end all catty threads: “Her hair is wild and Ginger and Wirey – her clothes Scream to Heaven – her eyebrows are a thin black pencil-line perpetually arched – her Bosom has the Ungirded Majesty of the Niagara… She bristles with Loose ends, darling, like a haystack.”
The fundamental difference between her writing being private and social media being public couldn’t shake the similarity for me. Social media may be designed for broadcast in a way her letters were not, but both hinge on performance. Showmanship and genre mastery are what make idiot-prophets like @dril (currently at 1.6 million followers on Twitter) successful. The same for Alexander. For all that her letters to Gershon and my posting with friends are different, her efforts to connect are likewise buoyed, and threatened, by her need to perform.
A favorite move of hers is the pretended dialogue. She doesn’t give Gershon lines, but she does introduce a topic, assume his response, and perform her thoughts as a reaction to his own. Should I fight with Pa again? she might query. I know you’d rather I didn’t, and for such and such reasons, but here are some arguments answering such and such reasons for why I will. The insertion and rejoinder are an implication of him into the letter, a performance of interaction for both their benefit.
But sometimes this performance is interrupted. In one letter, she writes about the pleasure of love as a physical and emotional pressure, anticipating and teasing and addressing Gershon in the usual manner. The letter ends, but she appends a post-script of sorts. She’s received mail from Gershon in the hours since, and apparently he’s frustrated with her. Her playfulness in an earlier letter has ticked him off. Her imaginary Gershon, who was just enjoying a nice chat about the Higher Plane of gentle repression (long story) is punctured. The person of air gives way to the person in flesh, and the tone of the letter nosedives to earth. She addresses him with a directness that underscores how often her letters are theater, a show for the purpose of connection, but still a show in lieu of connection—at best, a supplement, and at worst, make-believe.
Likewise, we’re almost never tweeting to discrete individuals or ranting directly at Facebook friends until the comments start. We sit in front of the screen and imagine our audience, and post to our imagination, and then the crowd manifests. Sometimes. Often the crowd ignores us. But when it doesn’t, the shift from monologue to dialogue exposes the limits of our performance. We’re speaking to no one, but rather pleading for, or conjuring, an interlocutor to meet loneliness. As dire as this sounds, it’s not meant to be a final dismissal in the name of the perils everyone already knows regarding social media, but rather a blunt understanding of the reality. When I joke on Twitter, it’s both to no one, and to the people I hope will understand best.
To talk about abstraction, though, is to risk abstraction, which is why I’ve brought along Eileen Alexander.
Unlikely as it may seem, that brings me back to Charles Taylor. Our modern experience of time, Taylor argues, is tied to what he calls (though not originally) “the view from nowhere.” Don’t these words scream “social media”? The most popular posting sites pretend to be embedded. Those who use them best, and I would argue those who use them healthiest (no guarantee), try to carve out an actual community of reliable buds, a reliable style. They are planted in Weird Catholic Twitter, Basketball Twitter, Mormon Dads Who Don’t Like Fishing Twitter, and so on. But half those communities, or more, are anonymous. And they all—we all—pronounce upon topics like manic dilettantes. Ah yes, we murmur within the internet’s collective maw, the Emoluments Clause, the State of Forest Fires, the Question of Federal Executions, the Scandal of College Admissions, and (apparently) There’s a Nine-Hour Justice League Film.
“To see human life in the view from nowhere,” says Taylor, “is to think in universal, and no longer parochial terms,” these universal terms being “coded as exclusively in the register of the understanding.” Why is the retreat to such a viewpoint addictive? I’ve mentioned Netflix once or twice, but really I’m focused on social media or even TV news bingeing. Last year may not have created new media habits, but it entrenched many. Hell, we invented the word “doomscrolling” as an epitaph for all our lost hours. We perused the timeline, some of us, until witnessing the algorithm’s abstraction felt more like inhabiting abstraction, an idiot’s view from nowhere, but with friends, family, or those we admired in sight.
The ambivalence of connecting through screens surely reached its climax of tension last year, too. Parents I know with school-age kids were caught wrong-footed by sudden tech imperatives. Teachers who’ve spent years forbidding devices were, overnight, reduced to app moderators. I’m not saying the trade-offs weren’t worthwhile, but what was personal failure in February 2020 was suddenly, in some cases, public good in March 2020. For many, whatever parochial terms were still possible in this modern world were effectively muted. Of course we got on Instagram more. And thank God for Facetime.
To talk about abstraction, though, is to risk abstraction, which is why I’ve brought along Eileen Alexander. During lockdown, Alexander’s letters were a continual rebuttal to my own preference for the (superficial) view from nowhere. Her tics of style which reminded me of social media ultimately served to highlight the ways in which her letters were building, or maintaining, a bridge to specificity, to the man she loved. She was keeping her place warm, keeping him loyal and attracted, knotting both of them together through the tiny, terrible scrawl of her stitch-like penmanship. The writing was an act of creation. Even when she was abstracting herself and Gershon and their love into characters and tropes for her letters, she was inviting a real person to keep orienting himself to her the same as she did toward him.
I remain ascetic in my digital proclivities, but I no longer think the question of social media can be resolved by all-or-nothing defaults.
For all that Alexander understands, even seems to embody, about the tensions of our lockdown eighty years ahead of her time, her anticipation of life after WWII is just as striking. What comes next? It’s the question we find ourselves facing personally, nationally, and even globally, and the same for Alexander and her compatriots in 1944. “I heard one woman say, darling,” she writes, “‘After the war I shall have my hair set twice a day and go abroad and sit in the sun in the most expensive bathing suit I can find.’” A reminder, if nothing else, that Alexander ran among the Jewish, haute bourgeoisie of London. Overhearing another decry “this sinister tendency to Russianise us – I want to be free again,” she asks Gershon, and us, “Free for what, darling?”
Earlier this year, I attended the funeral of a family friend who was also my schoolteacher. A wonderful woman, she didn’t die from Covid. But she was barely in her sixties, and the death was sudden and mysterious, like an image of Covid. That kept happening, life events contextualized by the pandemic, overwritten by the pandemic. The jolt of meaning ran the opposite direction as well. This singular, unlooked-for death of our old friend gave fuller shape to the deaths across the country which were so often numbers blipping along charts and headlines. I cried during the funeral, and was grateful we could safely gather in person. What a terrible year where that was too rarely the case. All the grief, all the mental health burdens we’ve outsourced to our children, all the escapism aimed at screens that mimic people, even people we know, and all of it both preexisting 2020 and heightened by 2020. What comes next?
After Gershon returns from Egypt, he and Alexander marry. But the letters don’t stop, not quite. In what amounts to an epilogue, we read messages from the few years after Gershon’s return, sent when he’s away for the war or for work, even if only for a few days or weeks. The experience of reading this section is akin to time-travel. Whereas the bulk of the book feels like a daily chat, an almost immersive view, the epilogue skips along like some shy cousin’s Instagram account, a wedding announcement appearing from thin air, then nothing again for weeks. She writes Gershon about a friend’s nuptials, in fact, a friend who’s appeared throughout, and it’s unsettling. Jean is getting married? I thought. I didn’t even know she was dating! Time, within the text, becomes a sucker-punch. The daily letters and the monthly letters inhabit the same page-space, but represent radically different intervals. It’s as if the book swallowed 2020’s time-wobbles whole and reproduced them as an afterthought of form.
And it gets worse. In media res, we find Alexander composing some lines in a hospital bed with her and Gershon’s baby, Kate. A… baby!? Four-hundred-plus pages of love talk and explicit hopes about sex and you didn’t even tell me that you were pregnant? The letters up to that moment felt on-hand, alive, in touch with me in 2020, and then their own epilogue placed them back in the amber of 1940s England. They were, and were not, present. They were, and were not, how she made her way through time. Time, for the reader, was crammed into the white space between letters rather than outlined in ink, which paradoxically made time feel huge, like—well, like an expanse that can’t be circumscribed.
There are several different neat conclusions from this shock, and from the letters as a whole. The most obvious is an implication to log off, to grow out of social media and seek enfleshed connections: Gershon comes home, and the letters go sparse. The problem is that this conclusion is stacked atop other neat conclusions, and together they make a mess. Given the analogy between Alexander’s letters and social media, for example, what do we take from the way her writing ordered her hopes, how they centered the person she needed most when he was physically removed; from the way her waiting was also a creating, the way her sense of time expanded toward life and not toward annihilation, even if only toward a life to come?
Her letters don’t make an argument for posting, but they don’t make the best argument against it either. Her obsessive recording and reaching out was survival, and even if she partly left it behind, she kept writing other friends, she kept using the means at hand for the sake of relationship. I remain ascetic in my digital proclivities, but I no longer think the question of social media can be resolved by all-or-nothing defaults. Delete your profiles if they’re killing you, yes, and stay off. But neither Alexander’s life nor the lockdowns are self-help courses capped by how-to advice. If some scrolling now and then gives life, stay focused on life, and send me your best jokes.
We wait, and after we receive, we wait for something different.
Alexander’s letters, though, and our experience of lockdown, deserve some kind of conclusion. I think eschatology, the end of time, might be the best lens. What better captures the paradoxes of activity through passivity, of hope for a new world blossoming amid the deterioration of the world we find? Eschatology is about the divine to come, the transcendent found and pre-figured in the normal trudge of life.
The talk around vaccines alone has been a sort of scientific, small-ball immanentizing of the eschaton. We’re waiting for the old world to pass away, or some of us are, and often we try to will our object-of-waiting, our waited-for, into existence. Our hope for post-pandemic relief, in this sense, is just another concentration of the larger norms into immediate stakes. We wait for the day we marry or have children or accept solitude or quit our jobs or quit ourselves or re-convert or die. We sit in our homes during lunch hour, every meal lasting at least an hour with my toddlers, and we feel like the slaves of time, like the clock’s tick is a playful whip that we’d like to control ourselves, or be numbed against. I’m exaggerating. I’m being honest. We wait, and after we receive, we wait for something different. We get the vaccine, and some of us find we still have young children and movie theaters remain in the beyond.
Alexander hopes for Gershon, and when he comes, amazingly, the new world begins. “In spite of all these static months of waiting and waiting,” she writes, “I am, by virtue of our love, more alive than most people.” Reading her among the seas of depressed, the mourning, the glass-eyed children who saw my wife at her clinic, the friends fried from new contortions of childcare, the friends hollowed by empty apartments, I believed her. I envied her, too. The letters were never her life, but preparation and supplement and balm. (She successfully tweeted through it!) I want the same for my own habits of time, for them to build and disappear the same as hers, to become an escape further into reality. I want to log on, log off, and live.
Joel Cuthbertson’s fiction and essays have previously appeared in Electric Literature, Dappled Things, and LitHub, among others. He lives in Denver with his wife and children.