100 Doors

“A hotel like The New Yorker has a rich and prolific history made, partly, by the prominent guests who have passed through its doors. One of the The New Yorker Hotel’s most famous guests stands out from the rest: Nikola Tesla.”

“Historic New Yorker” Hotel built in 1929

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Dear Alex,

Ugly things and beings come to us closer and faster than the beautiful. We seem to adore the ugly, yearn for it, turn and return to it, not knowing it.

About 100 days not too distant from now, a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases from an unknown cause in Wuhan was first reported by Chinese authorities to the World Health Organization. Then more alerts broke through about the outbreaks associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan. Something ugly was coming.

In his “One Hundred Days War" from March to June 1815, having escaped from his first exile on the island of Elba to Paris, Napoleon aimed to reclaim his throne of France with military art and precision. From the uglies of his earlier defeats, he had fled for a come-back to glory but then, much to the irony of time, he flung to his ugliest ruin in the Battle of Waterloo on an ugly Sunday pooled in blood.

After Waterloo, for 10 weeks at sea, Napoleon drifted in his second exile with his small entourage excluding his family to the obscure island of St. Helena where he lived his final 6 years, the first emperor of France scorned, a general forlorn. Though under vigilant watch in his new home, he was free to do what he liked for most of the time - morning walks, much writing and reading at first, then recounting and retracing Waterloo for himself before retracting behind closed doors to the uglies of shame accounting for his last throb.

We can say victory comes with an ugly cost but still we will to pay for it. The uglier the risk, the tighter our grip. No tide or wind can change our minds.

The last time at Sephora, I noticed another version of war in favor of the ugly: "the Overachiever High Coverage", “Drunk", "Up 2 No Good", "I Quit", "Black Opium", "Dagger Tattoo Liner”, names of death and the damned for many misses and madams in bloom of despair to flee from the ugly to the uglier within and apart from her and herself. Her insecurity that comes from curating confidence in mascara or mansion can lash out as ugly as a plague, reducing her to a byproduct of a product.

As for him, all he wants is to want it all just the same through his sunset years. At a Beijing park near the Forbidden City, single seniors gathered to find love. Guan, a robust 82-year-young romantic skilled in calligraphy, writing and tai chi, outlined his expectations for his future wife: “ideally in her 40s - yes, half his age - hygienic, smart, capable” with brownie points added if she could “bring spiritual relief and happiness”. Guan admitted, “I have problem: When you call me, I don’t call back. I’m pretty unreasonable. You have to chase me.” He might have sounded uglier than intended.

In the same park, Mr. Li posted and signed his ad: “Looking For A Soulmate. Male. Born in 1944. Divorced. No responsibilities.” He wanted a woman of certain range in height, weight and age. “No black moles. Willing to accompany me till the end of my life.” In trade, Mr. Li would gift his 1,100-square-foot home to her. Ugly or reasonable, his apartment was not shown in photo.

In his 80s, Nikola Tesla - who had once jolted the Chicago World Fair in 1893 with his invention, the alternating current technology, the genius whose magic of discovering light has rid us of our darkness, the gentleman whom many had known in person - unwound himself to fester in recluse, cut off from social ties, in love with pigeons at the park and, in particular, with one which flew by his account to his window at The New Yorker Hotel, his home for a decade till death.

To this day The New Yorker stands to open its doors in spite of the daily new records of death. The uglies have kept lurking from oligarchy to democracy. Nothing changed. All things will never be the same.

So how much uglier can things get as we have come and cycled through our 100 doors of opening to these 100 days now closed?

Last month, when asked about how we should come to this new ugly in metaphor and reality, Rowan Williams, guest speaker in BBC night news, said:

"I think the real question that’s posed to us here is: what does it really mean for us to live in a safe society, a society where vulnerable people are secure?

Because suddenly, when we are faced with insecurity on this scale, we realize how very poorly equipped we are as a society to look after those who can’t easily look after themselves... How important it is that we protect not only ourselves but others, primarily the people we care most about but with an infection like this, you can’t draw boundaries. The welfare of people we care most about is bound up with the welfare of those they’re close to. It’s really, genuinely, a shared challenge.

And when we’ve got that type of shared challenge, that puts us to one of the biggest moral questions to us: Do I understand that my well-being is completely bound up with the well-being of all my fellow human beings?

... I am a professional person, I’ve got an income, I’ve got a home and a family, and I’m thinking of all those people who are in zero-hours contracts, people in refugee camps, people on transit, people who really do not have the sort of comforts I have. So I am wary of sounding too pious about it and making it too easy because it just isn’t for an awful lot of people.

But, and this is, I think, really the most important thing: It is an important opportunity for people to work at what matters to them, really to settle down and think, what matters, who matters?

And the question who matters is a big one because of course, we are being asked to undertake all these very difficult social distancing exercises, not just to keep ourselves safe, but to keep safe the people we most care about. And that really brings front and center just how important to us are the people we love.”

There are a hundred doors to get and spread ugly. Williams gives us none.

Yours, Kate