“The Spectrum Generation” by Carolina De Robertis
I needed a break from work on Monday, and pulled the pile of “stuff to process” that has been sitting on the corner of my desk just a bit too long. There are no time-sensitive documents or essential tasks in this pile; rather, it’s the accumulation of things I’ve read or seen that I want to record in some way, whether it’s the name of a book to add to my library, an interesting item to keep handy for book ideas, or something to add to my clippings box. (Yes, I still keep a box of clippings from the newspaper and other print media.)
In August 2020, the San Francisco Chronicle did a set of special supplements on the pandemic, and in the August 30 edition was a short fiction piece, “The Spectrum Generation” by Carolina De Robertis. She frames it as a letter from a college student to his professor, written in the year 2030, about the assigned topic of “How the COVID Era Shaped Your Life”.
She imagines the letter writer as a science major who is having trouble fitting the assignment into the standard five-paragraph essay. The student claims not to be a writer, but “I was raised by an English teacher”, and the writing is wonderfully descriptive of the student’s experiences as a child during the pandemic.
What spoke to me most was this quote:
“Maybe that’s what I learned from TCE: we don’t have to fear change. This isn’t some dystopian future where all is lost. Those old narratives are so lazy. If all is lost, you can just throw up your hands in despair, and then what? Look at the climate crisis. We can’t afford those old despair stories anymore.
The more complicated truth takes all of where we are, and tries to see it clearly. The more complicated truth is that I may be part of a different generation, but I’m also my grandma’s grandson, and we all have to pick up where past generations left off and carry the work forward.”
I encourage you to read it in full; it’s a one page story, and well worth the time.
