How We Live Now: A collection of beautiful and sentimental moments
Title: How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic
Author: Bill Hayes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Pages: 150
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? You can pick this book up on any page and start reading, just like how you can bump into a stranger at any moment in their life and start spinning conversation. I recommend it to anyone who appreciates the small (beautiful but a bit boring) things in life, who loves NYC, and is looking for a light read.
Reading this book reminds me of the time I sat down in a café in downtown Toronto and did nothing but order a cappuccino and watch other people. Metropolitan life is what it is because of the countless strangers gathered in close proximity, all with bright hopes and dreams and idiosyncrasies, all feeling miniscule in the swallowing breaths of the city.
Here’s a clip of what I jotted down in 2019 (with small edits): “People watching, it sounds like such a monotonous thing to do. But if you look carefully, there’s amusement and awe and beauty in every single person I encounter. I don’t know any of these people, and I never will know their names or where they came from, or what delightful reason has brought them to the tiny coffee shop here on a lazy afternoon on the twelfth day of August. I can only see their movements and the shallow surface of their lives, without knowing any greater context of anything about them. But it’s so lovely to soak in someone’s expressions and motions, and put them into the context of their own lives, with them as the protagonist, and enjoy how imperfect and perfect we all are.”
How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic is a light book to read, almost as if it’s a collection of scatterbrained thoughts sprinkled with beautiful portraits of strangers. But these scatterbrained thoughts come from an odd and perilous time and encapsulate the turmoil in our immediate worlds.
In the pandemic, New York City fell. People died, families were torn apart, jobs werelost, and the most basic human connection we craved was stifled. Bill Hayes is a poet and a romantic. For the first time in 115 years of the New York subways running, all lines froze for four hours after midnight, and Bill compares losing that momentum and metabolism to open-heart surgery. It is fascinating how someone can survive momentarily without their heart pounding,but once it's placed back into their chest, there might never be a full or permanent recovery. The pandemic is a heartbreak, but Hayes still savours small moments. He falls in love with faces, strangers, moments that can be merely ordinary but also beautiful. Reading his words lets someone fall in love with the imperfections of New York City.
I love this paragraph so I bookmarked it — “He takes his wife’s hand, they walk off in the other direction, and, as sirens begin to blare, I think to myself: That’s what neighborliness is: You care enough to make sure there’s no trouble, but not so much that you completely embroiled in others’ lives and problems. This city is so dense, so intense, so compressed, so stressed, so dirty, so diverse, so tough on the the outside, so transparent in how it wears its heart on its sleeve, that you cannot survive here without occasional help from strangers”. Especially in a crowded city, when a virus spreads through human contact, how we live fundamentally changes. My heart is with everyone who suffered in the pandemic.
