A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life

Longtime friends Miles (Religion as We Know It), a religious studies professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Taylor (Seeing Silence), a religion professor at Columbia University, deliver an uneven collection of correspondence chronicling life during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a series of “lockdown letters” written between March 2020 and Jan. 7, 2021, the authors reflect on aging and the state of the world, charting the uncertainty of the pandemic’s early days with quotidian discussions of canceled plans alongside ruminations on mortality: “Death is now our familiar, isn’t it? It terrifies us, but not the way it once did.” Miles and Taylor also discuss politics, expressing frustration over the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic and fears that the president would use it as a pretext to postpone the 2020 election. There are some affecting insights (“We both discovered that our obsession with death is really a preoccupation with life”), but many will question the need to relive the minutiae of a time barely past with predictable takes (“Many of the people who support Trump drive pick-ups with gun racks and listen to country music on the radio”) and dry exchanges about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This faithfully captures the experience of living through 2020, for better or for worse. (July)