Once upon a time for this very site I wrote about a pandemic playlist I made early in the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, which included such gallows humor as “Don’t Stand (So Close To Me)” by the Police, “Corona” by the Minutemen, “Stay Away” by Nirvana, “It’s the End of the World (And I Feel Fine)” by R.E.M., and etc. I’ve had cause to revisit this old playlist lately, because my whole family caught the COVID yet again this last week; we’re all vaxxed and so it only feels like a “bad flu,” though what people keep forgetting is that a bad flu still feels like a bad flu, which I would only wish upon my worst enemies. Seriously, keep masking up and quarantining if you’re contagious, people. Our Dumb Pandemic still isn’t over.

Anyways. On recently revisiting said playlist (because we are constantly at risk of forgetting the pandemic entirely, I have observed with some distress), I remembered that I had also included Postal Service’s 2003 hit “We Will Become Silhouettes,” a track that definitely lands differently post-pandemic.

Almost too on the nose, the lyrics describe a mass-lockdown (“all the news reports recommended that I stay in doors”) during some sort of airborne-event threatening to kill everyone (“Because the air outside will make/Our cells divide at an alarming rate/Until our shells simply cannot hold/All our inside’s in and that’s when we’ll explode”). If Postal Service didn’t perfectly predict the details of the pandemic that would emerge nearly two decades later (COVID-19 after all collapses ones respiratory system in worst case scenarios—that is, it arguably makes one implode, not explode), it still absolutely nails the feeling of feeling anxious and trapped and isolated from everyone around you (“I’m screaming at the top of my lungs/Pretending the echoes belong to someone/Someone I used to know”).

Of course, it’s not that the song is the least bit prophetic, nor that singer Ben Gibbard drew from any sort of personal experience either, obviously (the early coronavirus-variant Bird Flu had indeed swept across east-Asia the year previous in 2002, but never threatened at the time to cross the Pacific—though Bush and Obama both did make preparations for that eventuality shortly thereafter—preparations that Trump fumbled catastrophically); rather, this is another example of what James Joyce meant when he said, “In the particular is found the universal.” That is, in the particular of a (at the time) fictional public lockdown event, Gibbard is expressing the more universal feeling of estrangement generally. It is worth recalling that the real-life pandemic lockdowns did not make us anxious and isolated and alienated from each other, no; it merely literalized these already-extant spiritual conditions.

This feeling of estrangement isn’t even a “Modern” condition per se (though modern conditions have certainly worsened them), but an existential one. We have always felt estranged from each other; we have all had the experience of feeling alone in a crowd since time immemorial; that means we have also always yearned for Atonement. What was most frustrating after the lockdowns finally ended was that we all only felt even more estranged from each other afterwords than before (and we weren’t exactly all getting along before hand).

You’d think we’d all be relieved to reunite in person and have a new-found appreciation for each other’s presence post-lockdowns, but again, no: the people who had dutifully masked-up and socially-distanced and gotten vaccinated, as well as the people who defiantly refused to do any of the above, looked upon each other with even greater animosity and contempt than ever. This isn’t some both-sider-ism, by the way, of claiming both groups are equally to blame for our collective-alienation or some such nonsense; it is simply to note the inherent human tragedy that even full-fledged human reunions so rarely bring about the Atonement, the divine reconciliation, that we are all feeling and longing after.

Maybe that doesn’t come until the next life; maybe that’s why Gibbard seems to look forward in this song with such giddy hope and anticipation, for the time when “We will Become Silhouettes” after we die–which we are all assured of becoming, whether it’s from a pandemic flu or something else or just everything else, because it is going to happen to every last one of us regardless. It is when we will all stand before our creator at last—the ultimate “someone [we] once knew,” of that person whom “when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is,” dimly remembered from our pre-mortal councils, even through the veil—and all things hidden will at last be revealed. It is when we will finally all actually become At One.