Yesterday

“Yesterday” is the famous Beatles song, but what does the word imply? Normally yesterday would be simply a more evolved form of today. But taking the broadest definition of the word referring to another epoch of time, the significance becomes murky. Is it the pandemic, or the comorbidities of political and racial unrest? The world is going through a period of discontinuity, a "paradigm shift" to employ the famous Thomas Kuhn locution when a new age has dawned within a relatively short period of chronological time. If the Ice Age was initiated when an asteroid hit the earth, humankind has essentially endured another one of those catastrophes in which though the race itself survived, it was unutterably altered in a way that makes us all like the aliens descending to earth, Stranger(s) in a Strange Land. The only difference is that the actual net effect won’t be totally evident until the dust settles. Just imagine yourself coming out of Grand Central and walking onto Vanderbilt Avenue, passing landmarks like the Yale Club as you walked toward Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue. At rush hour the streets were packed in the days before the threat of Covid shut the city down. Today, in the aftermath, the famed forest of midtown skyscrapers still remains haunted and empty, with no one knowing what part of the work force will resume its normal routines in structured office environments. If you grew up during the 60s, "yesterday" is still when "Yesterday" was a hit, regardless of the Proustian "madeleine."

Read "Yesterday" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star