Pandemic effects linger, and art invites us to pause and behold distance, time and trauma

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Pandemic effects linger, and art invites us to pause and behold distance, time and trauma

When I finished the manuscript for my book The Pause, which looked at the COVID-19 pandemic through the idea of “pausing,” a notion frequently invoked in pandemic discussions of suspended and cancelled activities, I was happy to be done and not to think about the pandemic anymore. My first instinct was to get rid of all the books I had bought on COVID-19, knowing that after living through the crisis I would never want to read them again. Yet wh…