https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/12/2020-lost-year/617382/
“The soldier’s life in camp is a very lazy life,” Coryell wrote in a letter home in 1863. In camp, he’d eat potatoes, beef, gravy, the occasional biscuit. “I am as fat as a fool,” he told his wife. “I don’t believe that you would [recognize] me now. I am so much larger than I was when I left home.”Coryell’s weight gain might sound uncomfortably familiar this year, but his experience also points to how strangely dull it can be to live through historic moments. In a pandemic as in war, the suffering and action are distributed highly unevenly, but 2020 has made lazy soldiers of many people.