In February 2020, as news about a novel coronavirus tracked from China to Italy to Seattle, I was in Alaska. Juneau, the state’s capital, sits between steep low mountains and the sea. Each morning I made coffee in my hotel and sat looking out the window, angling myself so that the lamp did not reflect me back at myself, but showed instead the darkness beyond the glass. I watched as the sun gradually raised the hillsides out of the black. When the light had resolved the slopes from a snow-covered blur to a blanket of Sitka spruce, I went running along the Gastineau Channel. It was always windy, the air raw with damp and sometimes sharp with driven snow. I ran regardless. That hour in the company of the turquoise water and a sky full of eagles was the only part of the day when I felt much clarity. By nine, I was at the Alaska State Archives, lost in file boxes and microfilm.
I am by profession a historian, and was in Juneau in the earliest days of research on a book about the Yukon River. There is a saturating, desperate feeling to learning a new space in the past. Coherence is elusive, disorientation the norm. The way out is through—through reading and listening and looking until the shape of a narrative flickers up from the waves of anecdotes and facts. So I read. About Yup’ik communities along the Yukon’s lower channel, and their distrust of the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century. About Gwich’in nations simultaneously trading with and thwarting the Hudson’s Bay Company, as it stretched British influence across Canada to the upper Yukon. About men climbing the Chilkoot Pass toward rumors of gold on a Yukon tributary called the Klondike. About the price of a good dog in Nulato and raw timber in Whitehorse. By the time the archive closed and I stumbled into the evening twilight, it was hard not to wonder if my muddling had any purpose.
It was this feeling, of a mind overheating from trying to pull sense out of shadows, that made me think, improbably, of Friedrich Nietzsche. Improbable because Nietzsche is hardly a regular intellectual companion of mine. I last read him in graduate school, and remember not particularly enjoying the experience. But walking home one evening, trying to diagnose my fatigue, I remembered Nietzsche linking historical inquiry to insomnia, a comparison that felt apt. Back in my room, I looked up the source, an essay of his published in 1874 called On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. It, unlike an archive, promised coherence. And Alaskan winter nights are long.
So it was that I spent early 2020, a year that in February looked no more interesting or eventful than any other in recent memory, reading Nietzsche and thinking about the uses of the past.