"On Zozobra"

Carlos Alberto Sanchez (San Jose State University)

The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic stopped us in our tracks. Suddenly, we were uncertain about a future that just days before appeared laid out in an ordinary progression. We had been living as if certainty was the default state of our being. Of course, no one was ever fully certain of ourselves and our future; but the uncertainty that we were capable of handling before the pandemic seemed, in retrospect, a manageable uncertainty. Modern life, it seems, had given us the tools to manage the unknown. The radical interruption of pandemic, however, was a different kind of newness, offering a different future that we feel ill-equipped to handle, and we feel uncertain about it in a new, deeper, way. Fueled by the nonstop cynicism and pessimism of our media and politics, this deeper uncertainty paints a frightening picture of our very next moment; even the illusory stability offered by modernity is torn to shreds. The constant bombardment of fatalism has broken down our defenses. The rug has been pulled out from under our feet, and the floor beneath is quicksand. In Mexican philosophy, the name for this feeling is “zozobra.”