Journal of a Plague Year

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2020

Thursday

I’ve been rereading Daniel Defoe’s extraordinary historical novel Journal of the Plague Year (1722), about the great London plague of 1665 and have found many disconcerting parallels with our own situation. As always with these posts, I must acknowledge that COVID-19 is nowhere near as lethal as the illnesses that show up in novels, but in some ways that makes the parallels more unsettling.

Defoe has been described as the father of both the novel and modern journalism, and sometimes it’s not clear when he’s writing which. Robinson Crusoe, for instance, was originally regarded as an actual first-hand account, and the same is true of Plague Year. To be sure, narrator H.F. may be based on Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, who kept actual journals of the plague, and Defoe appears to have done a fair amount of research to get details right. But he also uses character narratives, some undoubtedly invented, to capture the drama and the intensity of the plague.

Here are a few of the parallels. For instance, early during the outbreak, people play games with the numbers, trying to persuade themselves that the sickness will just go away:

The people showed a great concern [at the first two case of the plague], and began to be alarmed all over the town, and the more, because in the last week in December 1664 another man died in the same house, and of the same distemper. And then we were easy again for about six weeks, when none having died with any marks of infection, it was said the distemper was gone; but after that, I think it was about the 12th of February, another died in another house, but in the same parish and in the same manner.

This turned the people’s eyes pretty much towards that end of the town, and the weekly bills showing an increase of burials in St Giles’s parish more than usual, it began to be suspected that the plague was among the people at that end of the town, and that many had died of it, though they had taken care to keep it as much from the knowledge of the public as possible. 

One reason that people conceal the plague is because they are afraid of being locked in their homes. It’s an extreme version of sheltering in place:

It is true that the locking up the doors of people’s houses, and setting a watchman there night and day to prevent their stirring out or any coming to them, when perhaps the sound people in the family might have escaped if they had been removed from the sick, looked very hard and cruel; and many people perished in these miserable confinements which, ’tis reasonable to believe, would not have been distempered if they had had liberty, though the plague was in the house; at which the people were very clamorous and uneasy at first, and several violences were committed and injuries offered to the men who were set to watch the houses so shut up; also several people broke out by force in many places, as I shall observe by-and-by. But it was a public good that justified the private mischief, and there was no obtaining the least mitigation by any application to magistrates or government at that time, at least not that I heard of.

At the height of the plague, as currently is the case in Italy, the streets are deserted:

Business led me out sometimes to the other end of the town, even when the sickness was chiefly there; and as the thing was new to me, as well as to everybody else, it was a most surprising thing to see those streets which were usually so thronged now grown desolate, and so few people to be seen in them, that if I had been a stranger and at a loss for my way, I might sometimes have gone the length of a whole street (I mean of the by-streets), and seen nobody to direct me…

Because of their “terrors and apprehensions,” people are willing to swallow all kinds of fraudulent pronouncements, just as many have swallowed the shallow reassurances of the president and various Republican politicians:

One mischief always introduces another. These terrors and apprehensions of the people led them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things, which they wanted not a sort of people really wicked to encourage them to: and this was running about to fortune-tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to know their fortune, or, as it is vulgarly expressed, to have their fortunes told them, their nativities calculated, and the like; and this folly presently made the town swarm with a wicked generation of pretenders to magic, to the black art, as they called it, and I know not what; nay, to a thousand worse dealings with the devil than they were really guilty of…

As always, the economically vulnerable suffer the worst:

[A]ll trades being stopped, employment ceased: the labor, and by that the bread, of the poor were cut off; and at first indeed the cries of the poor were most lamentable to hear…

Many of these were the miserable objects of despair which I have mentioned before, and were removed by the destruction which followed. These might be said to perish not by the infection itself but by the consequence of it; indeed, namely, by hunger and distress and the want of all things: being without lodging, without money, without friends, without means to get their bread, or without anyone to give it them…

Let anyone who is acquainted with what multitudes of people get their daily bread in this city by their labor, whether artificers or mere workmen—I say, let any man consider what must be the miserable condition of this town if, on a sudden, they should be all turned out of employment, that labor should cease, and wages for work be no more.

These people become so desperate for income that they are prepared to do anything—just like those service providers in our own society that we cannot do without:

It must be confessed that though the plague was chiefly among the poor, yet were the poor the most venturous and fearless of it, and went about their employment with a sort of brutal courage; I must call it so, for it was founded neither on religion nor prudence; scarce did they use any caution, but ran into any business which they could get employment in, though it was the most hazardous. Such was that of tending the sick, watching houses shut up, carrying infected persons to the pest-house, and, which was still worse, carrying the dead away to their graves.

As with us, many games and entertainments (“idle assemblies”)  are closed down, including the following. Defoe here quotes from official documents:

Plays.
‘That all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited, and the parties offending severely punished by every alderman in his ward.

Feasting prohibited.
‘That all public feasting, and particularly by the companies of this city, and dinners at taverns, ale-houses, and other places of common entertainment, be forborne till further order and allowance; and that the money thereby spared be preserved and employed for the benefit and relief of the poor visited with the infection.

Tippling-houses.
‘That disorderly tippling in taverns, ale-houses, coffee-houses, and cellars be severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague. And that no company or person be suffered to remain or come into any tavern, ale-house, or coffee-house to drink after nine of the clock in the evening, according to the ancient law and custom of this city, upon the penalties ordained in that behalf.

We also see social distancing measures, along with a 17th version of hand sanitizers:

It is true people used all possible precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hands, and all the means that could be used were used, but then the poor could not do even these things, and they went at all hazards.

As with us, commerce takes a beating:

It must not be forgot here to take some notice of the state of trade during the time of this common calamity, and this with respect to foreign trade, as also to our home trade.

As to foreign trade, there needs little to be said. The trading nations of Europe were all afraid of us; no port of France, or Holland, or Spain, or Italy would admit our ships or correspond with us; indeed we stood on ill terms with the Dutch, and were in a furious war with them, but though in a bad condition to fight abroad, who had such dreadful enemies to struggle with at home.

Our merchants were accordingly at a full stop; their ships could go nowhere—that is to say, to no place abroad; their manufactures and merchandise—that is to say, of our growth—would not be touched abroad. They were as much afraid of our goods as they were of our people…

Finally, one day, everything clears up and normalcy returns. I share this last passage because it is what we long for–and also because it contains the warning, which we are hearing from our own scientists, that diseases don’t necessarily leave for good:

But the mercy of God was greater to the rest than we had reason to expect; for the malignity (as I have said) of the distemper was spent, the contagion was exhausted, and also the winter weather came on apace, and the air was clear and cold, with sharp frosts; and this increasing still, most of those that had fallen sick recovered, and the health of the city began to return. There were indeed some returns of the distemper even in the month of December, and the bills increased near a hundred; but it went off again, and so in a short while things began to return to their own channel. And wonderful it was to see how populous the city was again all on a sudden, so that a stranger could not miss the numbers that were lost. Neither was there any miss of the inhabitants as to their dwellings—few or no empty houses were to be seen, or if there were some, there was no want of tenants for them.

And further on:

In the middle of their distress, when the condition of the city of London was so truly calamitous, just then it pleased God—as it were by His immediate hand to disarm this enemy; the poison was taken out of the sting. It was wonderful; even the physicians themselves were surprised at it. Wherever they visited they found their patients better; either they had sweated kindly, or the tumors were broke, or the carbuncles went down and the inflammations round them changed color, or the fever was gone, or the violent headache was assuaged, or some good symptom was in the case; so that in a few days everybody was recovering, whole families that were infected and down, that had ministers praying with them, and expected death every hour, were revived and healed, and none died at all out of them

I’m just hoping that most of us, in a few months time, will be able to say, along with the narrator,

A dreadful plague in London
 In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!
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Pale Horse, Pale Rider–in 1918 and Now

By Robin Bates | Published: March 17, 2020
Gustave Doré, Death on a Pale Horse

Wednesday

Reader William McKeachie has alerted me to a Katharine Anne Porter novella about the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in America. Reading Pale Horse, Pale Rider, I got a glimpse of what we Americans may be facing very soon.

Protagonist Miranda is a city reporter in the waning days of World War I who begins dating Adam, a soldier about to depart for the front. They both assume he will die there, which makes their few days together particularly precious.

She liked him, she liked him, and there was more than this but it was no good even imagining, because he was not for her nor for any woman, being beyond experience already, committed without any knowledge or act of his own to death.

One doesn’t have to go to the front to encounter death, however.  Adam’s leave has been extended because the flu has broken out on his army base, and Adam and Miranda see evidence of the outbreak as they walk through New York and witness one funeral procession after another. With the same bravado that he talks about his upcoming war service, Adam discusses the flu:

“I wonder,” said Miranda. “How did you manage to get an extension of leave?”

“They just gave it,” said Adam, “for no reason. The men are dying like flies out there, anyway. This funny new disease. Simply knocks you into a cocked hat.”

“It seems to be a plague,” said Miranda, “something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?”

“Never did. Well, let’s be strong minded and not have any of it. I’ve got four days more straight from the blue and not a blade of grass must grow under our feet.

It so happens that Miranda has the flu, but she refuses to admit it to herself or Adam, wanting to make the most of their remaining time.

“There’s something terribly wrong,” she told Adam. “I feel too rotten. It can’t just be the weather, and the war.”

“The weather is perfect,” said Adam, “and the war is simply too good to be true. But since when? You were all right yesterday.”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, her voice sounding small and thin. They stopped as always at the open door before the flight of littered steps leading up to the newspaper loft. Miranda listened for a moment to the rattle of typewriters above, the steady rumble of presses below.

“I wish we were going to spend the whole afternoon on a park bench,” she said, “or drive to the mountains.”

When she collapses, Adam nurses her all that he can. In a situation that may be our future as well, she must stay in her apartment (much to the concern of her landlady) because all the hospitals are full.

“Adam,” she said, “I’ve just thought of something. Maybe they forgot St. Luke’s Hospital. Call the sisters there and ask them not to be so selfish with their silly old rooms. Tell them I only want a very small dark ugly one for three days, or less. Do try them, Adam.”

He believed, apparently, that she was still more or less in her right mind, for she heard him at the telephone explaining in his deliberate voice. He was back again almost at once, saying, “This seems to be my day for getting mixed up with peevish old maids. The sister said that even if they had a room you couldn’t have it without doctor’s orders. But they didn’t have one, anyway. She was pretty sour about it.”

“Well,” said Miranda in a thick voice, “I think that’s abominably rude and mean, don’t you?” She sat up with a wide gesture of both arms, and began to retch again, violently.

Miranda miraculously survives after being given up for dead and is conscious enough to hear Armistice celebrations outside her window. Adam, however, has himself contracted the flu and is not so fortunate. The dying does not end with the war.

More than the plot and the setting, I was pulled in by the novella’s hallucinatory atmosphere, which captures my own sense of dread. The story opens with a haunting dream of trying to outride death:

Come now, Graylie [her horse], she said, taking his bridle, we must outrun Death and the Devil. You are no good for it, she told the other horses standing saddled before the stable gate, among them the horse of the stranger, gray also, with tarnished nose and ears. The stranger swung into his saddle beside her, leaned far towards her and regarded her without meaning, the blank still stare of mindless malice that makes no threats and can bide its time. She drew Graylie around sharply, urged him to run. He leaped the low rose hedge and the narrow ditch beyond, and the dust of the lane flew heavily under his beating hoofs. The stranger rode beside her, easily, lightly, his reins loose in his half-closed hand, straight and elegant in dark shabby garments that flapped upon his bones; his pale face smiled in an evil trance, he did not glance at her. Ah, I have seen this fellow before, I know this man if I could place him. He is no stranger to me.

She pulled Graylie up, rose in her stirrups and shouted, I’m not going with you this time— ride on! Without pausing or turning his head the stranger rode on. Gray lie’s ribs heaved under her, her own ribs rose and fell. Oh, why am I so tired, I must wake up.

If one imagines the dream accompanied by the negro spiritual mentioned later in the novella—“Pale horse, pale rider, done take my lover away”—it becomes even darker.

Equally nightmarish is Porter’s description of Miranda’s descent to the edge of death. How many will experience something like what the author describes?

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.

In Miranda’s case, however, the “stubborn will to live” also asserts itself and in the end triumphs. It occurs when she surrenders to her fate:

Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.

Miranda goes on to witness unparalleled beauty,  

a deep clear landscape of sea and sand, of soft meadow and sky, freshly washed and glistening with transparencies of blue. Why, of course, of course, said Miranda, without surprise but with serene rapture as if some promise made to her had been kept long after she had ceased to hope for it.

 

With “an amazement of joy” she sees “faces transfigured” of all the people she has known that are still alive, “each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows.”

But because she does not see Adam among the living—instinctively she must know that he is dead—she is then plunged into despair:

A thought struggled at the back of her mind, came clearly as a voice in her ear. Where are the dead? We have forgotten the dead, oh, the dead, where are they? At once as if a curtain had fallen, the bright landscape faded, she was alone in a strange stony place of bitter cold, picking her way along a steep path of slippery snow, calling out. Oh, I must go back! But in what direction? Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand.

America, like those other countries with our transmission rate (China, Italy, Spain), will be experiencing such highs and lows in the coming weeks and months. Then, at some point, the world will develop herd immunity and vaccines, and we will be facing the future that Miranda faces in the novella’s concluding paragraph:

No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.

Right now we must focus on our grim present. Looking ahead will come later.

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Not Poe’s Red Death but Still Dangerous

By Robin Bates | Published: March 16, 2020

Tuesday

I am devoting this week to plague literature because America is still not taking COVID-19 seriously enough. Although some have awakened to the threat it poses, the fact that only a few are taking radical measures is an indictment of Donald J. Trump. If he were to tell entire country to “go home and stay home”—to whatever extent that is possible, of course—then every state in the union would be taking action.

Instead, while Washington, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, the San Francisco area, and others have started ordering universal closures, my home state of Tennessee is one of eight states taking no policy action and providing no guidance. Lack of national leadership means that far too many jurisdictions are winging it.

What we have is a “Masque of the Red Death” situation. Harold Bloom once wrote that Edgar Allan Poe dreamt America’s nightmares, and he certainly dreamed our present nightmare in his famous plague story. Just as Trump’s first impulse, in the face of contagion, was to institute travel bans, Prince Prospero’s is to build a wall:

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

I’m still stunned that there were massive light-hearted parties in cities all across America this past weekend, that certain Republican legislators were still pooh-poohing strong measures, and that Trump was still downplaying the threat. Granted, COVID-19 is not as deadly as the red death, but given our lack of testing and strong measures, it will overwhelm American hospitals. We know, from the examples of Italy, Spain, and now France, that this is an inevitability. It will happen!

And yet, because we are “amply provisioned,” far too many Americans think they “might bid defiance to contagion”:

The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

 There comes a reckoning, of course. As many have pointed out, epidemics don’t pay attention to walls or boundaries. Who knows which of the revelers brought the Red Death to Prince Prospero’s party. In any event, he is a presence so imposing that even the wildest stand still and pay attention:

At first, as [Prince Prospero] spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who, at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth a hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and while the vast assembly, as with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first…

Poe’s story horrifies, of course, because the fatality rate upon contact with the red death appears to be 100%, not the estimated 3.5% of COVID-19. Because I am living with a 94-year-old mother for whom one slip could be fatal, however, that is small consolation. (For that matter, I myself am 68 and therefore in the danger zone.) If drastic measures—which should have been enacted weeks ago—are not put in place soon, we will have our own version of Poe’s finale. Not as dark, to be sure, but dark all the same:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Stop your frantic avoidance dancing, America! Prince Prospero’s travel bans will not save you.

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To Understand COVID-19, Read Camus

By Robin Bates | Published: March 15, 2020

Monday

Liesl Schillinger of Literary Hub has applied Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) to the COVID-19 outbreak and found it only too relevant, even though the coronavirus is far less deadly.

She notes that, as an existential parable, Plague can refer to either biological epidemics or a political ones (like the fascism that Camus had just watched wash over Europe). Let’s go with the biological one.

Just as Donald Trump, worried about political fallout, ordered administrators to ignore early warning signs, so signs are missed in the novel. Here too a hoax is suspected:

The first to encounter [rats dying in batches] is a local doctor named Rieux, who summons his concierge, Michel, to deal with the nuisance, and is startled when Michel is “outraged,” rather than disgusted. Michel is convinced that young “scallywags” must have planted the vermin in his hallway as a prank. Like Michel, most of Oran’s citizens misinterpret the early “bewildering portents,” missing their broader significance. For a time, the only action they take is denouncing the local sanitation department and complaining about the authorities. “In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves,” the narrator reflects. “They were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.” Camus shows how easy it is to mistake an epidemic for an annoyance.

Even when the plague begins claiming human victims, people find ways to minimize what they are witnessing:

But then Michel falls sick and dies. As Rieux treats him, he recognizes the telltale signs of plague, but at first persuades himself that, “The public mustn’t be alarmed, that wouldn’t do at all.” Oran’s bureaucrats agree. The Prefect (like a mayor or governor, in colonial Algeria) “personally is convinced that it’s a false alarm.” A low-level bureaucrat, Richard, insists the disease must not be identified officially as plague, but should be referred to merely as “a special type of fever.” But as the pace and number of deaths increases, Rieux rejects the euphemism, and the town’s leaders are forced to take action.

Authorities are liable to minimize the threat of an epidemic, Camus suggests, until the evidence becomes undeniable that underreaction is more dangerous than overreaction. Most people share that tendency, he writes, it’s a universal human frailty: “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.”

 This helps explain why Trump, who’s good as diagnosing what (certain) people want, is still underplaying the epidemic. He’s telling them what they want to believe, and they are all too willing to follow his lead. In my very red state of Tennessee, polls tell me that 40% of Republicans still do not take COVID-19 seriously.

Schillinger points out an observation also made by Boccaccio (who witnessed the Black Death up close) that epidemics can lead to excessive partying. This is one way to think of the St. Patrick’s Day pub parties we saw this past week in such cities as New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Nashville. Schillinger writes of

the “hectic exaltation” of the ordinary people trapped in the epidemic’s bubble, who fought their sense of isolation by dressing up, strolling aimlessly along Oran’s boulevards; and splashing out at restaurants, poised to flee should a fellow diner fall ill, caught up in “the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity…”

In other words, some panicked instinct for life and fellowship can take over at such moments, even by people who outwardly believe the sickness will pass them by. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” gets at the same psychological reality. At some level, this is recognized even by those 40% who are grateful to Trump for making them feel better.

Schillinger also points out a grim but predictable reality: whatever we learn from one epidemic may be ignored come the next one. Trump taking apart the Pandemic Response Apparatus that Barack Obama set up following the Ebola outbreak could have been foreseen. As Camus writes,

There have been as many plagues as wars in history. Yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

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The Plague Full Swift Goes By

By Robin Bates | Published: March 14, 2020
Unknown artist, Triumph of Death (1446)

Spiritual Sunday

As the world grapples with the rapid spread of the coronavirus, I share a poem written during a 16th century London plague.  Such plagues regularly swept through London, and a later one may actually have carried off the author Thomas Nashe, who died at 34.

In “Litany in Time of Plague,” Nashe at first takes a stoic attitude towards death, observing that “this world uncertain is” and that “life’s lustful joys” are “but toys.” He’s almost matter of fact when he writes, “Beauty is but a flower/ Which wrinkles will devour.” Helen of Troy and Hector, the most beautiful of women and the most valiant of warriors, both end up as food for worms.

The poem also offers us the Christian consolation: “Heaven is our heritage,/ Earth but a player’s stage.”

Yet however consoling these sentiments, by ending each stanza with “I am sick, I must die” and then a prayer (litany) to God, we see that no amount of stoic reasoning or even Christian reassurance can make our terror vanish. All we can do is hand our lives over to a greater power.

COVID-19 is not the Bubonic plague. It’s still a killer, however.

Litany in Time of Plague
 By Thomas Nashe

Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss;
 This world uncertain is;
 Fond are life’s lustful joys;
 Death proves them all but toys;
 None from his darts can fly;
 I am sick, I must die.
           Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
 Gold cannot buy you health;
 Physic himself must fade.
 All things to end are made,
 The plague full swift goes by;
 I am sick, I must die.
             Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
 Which wrinkles will devour;
 Brightness falls from the air;
 Queens have died young and fair;
 Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
 I am sick, I must die.
             Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,
 Worms feed on Hector brave;
 Swords may not fight with fate,
 Earth still holds ope her gate.
 ‘Come, come!’ the bells do cry.
 I am sick, I must die.
             Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness
 Tasteth death’s bitterness;
 Hell’s executioner
 Hath no ears for to hear
 What vain art can reply.
 I am sick, I must die.
             Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,
 To welcome destiny;
 Heaven is our heritage,
 Earth but a player’s stage;
 Mount we unto the sky.
 I am sick, I must die.
             Lord, have mercy on us!

A note on the painting: The fresco, by an unknown artist, was painted a century after the Black Plague. Too many Americans are like the people in the upper half of the picture, walking their dogs and congregating in social spaces, even as death rides its horse. It’s too late for those in the lower half, who have been caught unawares.

One other thought: In Monday’s post (see link below), I quoted Boccaccio observing people, during the Black Plague, carousing in bars. As I write this, bars are filled in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere with partiers celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Some will be spreading the virus. Lord, have mercy on us.

Here’s the passage:

Others…carouse and make merry and go about singing and frolicking and satisfy the appetite in everything possible and laugh and scoff at whatsoever befell was a very certain remedy for such an ill. That which they said they put in practice as best they might, going about day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking without stint or measure…

Previous posts on the coronavirus

Boccaccio: What to Do When Quarantined
Lady Macbeth: Hand Washing and the Coronavirus
Stephen King on How Pandemics Spread

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Curl Up with a Good Book

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2020
Petrus van Schendel, Reading by Candlelight

For some comic relief in these dark times, here’s a poem by my father about an introverted candle who chooses (contra Jesus’s instructions) to hide his light under a bushel. What is more enticing, after all, than curling up with a good book.

If COVID-19 is prompting you to avoid society and if you’re frustrated that sports have vanished from the air waves, look to reading. Amazing worlds await your discovery.

The Retiring Candle
By Scott Bates

A Candle
 Burned under
 A bushel

He did not let his light shine forth
 Among Men
 He did not even let his light shine forth
 Among Potatoes
 The bushel was empty
 (Being upside down)
 And somewhat stuffy besides

They all called down to him
 To come up on deck
 And get some air
 They wanted him to be the life of the party
 To shine
 Illuminate eternal verities
 Set the world on fire

But no
 He politely declined
 He didn’t want to set the world on fire
 All he wanted to do was stay down in the hold
 And smoke
 And curl up with a good book

Which he did

He smoked and curled up with
 The poems of Yevtushenko
 The Theory of the Leisure Class
 Perrault the Duc de la Rochefoucauld
 Erewhon and Through the Looking Glass
 Also assorted Elizabethan sonnets

When he had finished
 He put himself out
 And went to sleep
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Biden vs. Bernie, Aeneas vs. Turnus

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2020
Giordano, Aeneas Defeats Turnus

Thursday

Probably it was because I had just taught the Aeneid earlier in the day, but as I watched the Democratic primary results roll in Tuesday evening, I couldn’t help but think of Joe Biden as Aeneas and Bernie Sanders as Turnus. In the battle-to-the-death that ends Virgil’s epic, Aeneas wins the day but Turnus, although he is killed, receives a substantial consolation prize.

Here’s the plot background you need to know. The omens tell King Latinus he should give his daughter to a stranger about to show up on his shores (Aeneas) rather than to hometown boy Turnus, a charismatic but volatile warrior. Turnus, needless to say, objects, as does the queen, and the result is six books of bloody warfare. By the epic’s final book, however, Latinus wants to return to his original plan. There’s been enough fighting, he points out to Turnus, and there’s enough land and wealth for everyone to live contentedly.

Turnus insists on the solitary combat, however, which for us may sound like Sunday’s upcoming debate between Biden and Sanders. A solemn pact is sworn by both sides to abide by the outcome. The Latins, however, lose confidence in Turnus, which leads them to breach the pact. Fighting breaks out again, Aeneas is hit with an arrow, and Turnus, sensing that the moment could be his, goes charging into the fray rather than attempting to hold his troops back. As a result, many more men die, the last one being Turnus himself.

If I were living in the Age of Dryden or the Age of Pope, it would not be a stretch to apply The Aeneid to modern politics. Allusions to Virgil’s epic are scattered throughout Mac Flecknoe, Rape of the Lock, and other poems, adding to the dense texture of the works.  Readers raised on the classics would recognize and appreciate the references.

Pretend, then, that you are in the British 17th or 18th century as you draw the parallels. King Latinus is the Democratic electorate (Bernie Sanders calls it the Democratic Establishment) that wants a peaceful resolution to the conflict. He could be South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, who said after Biden’s convincing Michigan win, “I think it is time for us to shut this primary down, it is time for us to cancel the rest of these debates…” 

Latinus makes a similar case to Turnus, telling him he’d rather see him comprising and alive than principled and dead:

Since then, Turnus, 
you see what assaults, what crises dog my steps, 
what labors you have shouldered, you, first of all. 
Beaten twice in major battles, our city walls 
can scarcely harbor Italy’s future hopes. 
The rushing Tiber still steams with our blood, 
the endless fields still glisten with our bones. 
Why do I shrink from my decision? What insanity 
shifts my fixed resolve? If, with Turnus dead, 
I am ready to take the Trojans on as allies, 
why not stop the war while he is still alive?

Turnus, however, insists on his one-on-one battle. The situation would still be similar to the one the Democratic Party is hoping for, however: whoever wins will get the hand of Lavinia whereas whoever loses will withdraw his claim, with Aeneas returning to a Trojan encampment in Sicily. If he wins, however, he will be magnanimous, opening his arms to the Latins as Biden on Wednesday opened his arms to Bernie supporters:

I call on the springs and streams, the gods enthroned 
in the arching sky and gods of the deep blue sea! 
If by chance the victory goes to the Latin, Turnus, 
we agree the defeated will depart to Evander’s city, 
Iulus will leave this land. Nor will Aeneas’ Trojans 
ever revert in times to come, take up arms again 
and threaten to put this kingdom to the sword. 
But if Victory grants our force-in-arms the day, 
as I think she may—may the gods decree it so— 
I shall not command Italians to bow to Trojans, 
nor do I seek the scepter for myself. 
May both nations, undefeated, under equal laws, 
march together toward an eternal pact of peace. 
I shall bestow the gods and their sacred rites. 
My father-in-law Latinus will retain his armies, 
my father-in-law, his power, his rightful rule. 
The men of Troy will erect a city for me— 
Lavinia will give its walls her name.

Turnus accedes to the rules—let’s call them the rules to be followed at the Democratic Convention—and all looks promising. Then Turnus’s followers begin acting up.

There is some concern that Sanders will not be able to bring along some of his own followers, just as he failed to bring along everyone in the 2016 election. To cite one instance, African American surrogate and Sanders delegate Cornel West voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in the general election. Will Bernie’s troops rebel again this time if their leader calls it quits, just as Turnus’s troops do when they begin losing confidence in him. Turnus, like Bernie, may want to end the hostilities with one last glorious combat, but that’s small consolation to his followers if he loses. Here they are being urged to violate the peace pact:

Aren’t you ashamed, Rutulians, putting at risk 
the life of one to save us all? Don’t we match them 
in numbers, power? Look, these are all they’ve got— 
Trojans, Arcadians, and all the Etruscan forces, 
slaves to Fate—to battle Turnus in arms! Why, 
if only half of us went to war, each soldier 
could hardly find a foe. But Turnus, think, 
he’ll rise on the wings of fame to meet the gods, 
gods on whose altars he has offered up his life: 
he will live forever, sung on the lips of men! 
But we, if we lose our land, will bow to the yoke, 
enslaved by our new high lords and masters— 
we who idle on amid our fields!” 

Stinging taunts 
inflame the will of the fighters all the more 
till a low growing murmur steals along the lines.

Much bloodshed follows. I noted that both Turnus and Bernie, however, get consolation prizes. While Jupiter allows Aeneas to triumph, he promises the disappointed Juno that the hero’s future empire won’t be named after the Trojans. Instead, Turnus’s Latins will get that honor:

Smiling down, 
the creator of man and the wide world returned: 
“Now there’s my sister. Saturn’s second child— 
such tides of rage go churning through your heart. 
Come, relax your anger. It started all for nothing. 
I grant your wish. I surrender. Freely, gladly too. 
Latium’s sons will retain their fathers’ words and ways. 
Their name till now is the name that shall endure. 
Mingling in stock alone, the Trojans will subside. 
And I will add the rites and the forms of worship, 
and make them Latins all, who speak one Latin tongue. 
Mixed with Ausonian blood, one race will spring from them, 
and you will see them outstrip all men, outstrip all gods 
in reverence. No nation on earth will match the honors 
they shower down on you.”

Sanders’s consolation is to have pulled the entire Democratic Party in a more progressive direction. Political John Stoehr of the Editorial Board explains that it only seems like the moderates have won:

Exit polls show Democratic voters want things like universal health care, higher wages, affordable housing and the rest. They want, in other words, what Bernie Sanders was selling them. They just don’t want to buy it from Sanders. 

These progressive policies, he predicts, will continue in a Biden administration:

[Biden is] less candidate than vessel into which the party will pour its ambitions. I think legendary broadcaster Dan Rather was right when he said: “Joe Biden is being characterized as a ‘moderate,’ but if elected I think it might turn out that he ends up presiding over one of the most progressive administrations in American history. It’s where his party is going, and on many issues where the country is going as well.”

Some scholars believe that Turnus is a sacrifice that ensures the ultimate triumph of the Latins. Could Bernie be such a sacrifice as well, a leftwing version of Barry Goldwater, who paved the way for Ronald Reagan? Could this be a case of losing the battle but winning the war?

Of course, all this is predicated on Biden becoming first the nominee and then the president.

Further thought: In some ways, Virgil is in the same position as Chair of the National Democratic Committee Tom Perez, knowing that the Trojans and the Latins must one day reunite in common cause and hoping that not too much damage occurs before then. The following passage sums up the fears and the hopes of both men:

Now what god can unfold for me so many terrors?
 Who can make a song of slaughter in all its forms—
 the deaths of captains down the entire field,
dealt now by Turnus, now by Aeneas, kill for kill?
 Did it please you so, great Jove, to see the world at war,
 the peoples clash that would later live in everlasting peace?

Granted, equating “the world at war” with the Democratic primaries is hyperbolic, but you get the point.

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“The Farewell’s” Oscar Wilde Ending

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2020
Zhao, Awkwafina in The Farewell

Wednesday

As I was watching the lovely film Farewell this past week [warning: major spoiler alert], a passage from The Importance of Being Earnest came to mind. The startling premise of the film matches up with a very funny Oscar Wilde interchange.

The film is about the apparently common Chinese custom of hiding from cancer patients their actual condition. While the granddaughter and her parents claim to be returning to the homeland to attend a family wedding, they have really shown up because doctors have predicted the grandmother will die in a few months. The wedding itself has been moved forward to give them a plausible reason for their presence.

The drama lies in whether they can hide the real reason from the grandmother, who is quite sharp.

As an uncle explains to the skeptical Chinese-American protagonist, her belief in transparency and individualism gets trumped in China by a family’s belief that they should carry the expected death of a relative on their own shoulders. The grandmother shouldn’t have to worry about such a thing.

The doctors’ falsehood, however, turns out to be true. We think we’re seeing the grandmother’s final days as the family leaves to go back to America, only to be informed during the credits that she’s still alive four years later. (The film claims to be based on a true story—or as it puts it, a real lie.) In other words, she lives up to what her doctors publicly proclaim.

In Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon suddenly finds himself forced to account for the absence of his imaginary invalid friend Bunbury when his aunt unexpectedly shows up. He bumbles his way to an excuse:

Lady Bracknell.  May I ask if it is in this house that your invalid friend Mr. Bunbury resides?
Algernon.  [Stammering.]  Oh!  No!  Bunbury doesn’t live here.  Bunbury is somewhere else at present.  In fact, Bunbury is dead.
Lady Bracknell.  Dead!  When did Mr. Bunbury die?  His death must have been extremely sudden.
Algernon.  [Airily.]  Oh!  I killed Bunbury this afternoon.  I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon.
Lady Bracknell.  What did he die of?
Algernon.  Bunbury?  Oh, he was quite exploded.
Lady Bracknell.  Exploded!  Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage?  I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation.  If so, he is well punished for his morbidity.
Algernon.  My dear Aunt Augusta, I mean he was found out!  The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean—so Bunbury died.
Lady Bracknell.  He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians.  I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.  

The grandmother in The Farewell also has great confidence in the opinion of her physicians. Under proper medical advice–at least by Chinese standards–she shoulders on.

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What to Do When Quarantined

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2020
Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron

Tuesday

Washington Post humorist Alexandra Petri yesterday tweeted out the following message about coronavirus in the news, leading to today’s post:

I’ve had enough of this news! time to read some escapist literature, maybe a classic I’ve been putting off for a long time now to take a big sip of coffee and open this copy of the Decameron

Decameron (1353) is about a group of young men and women who retreat to a rural villa to escape from the Black Plague, which in 1347-51 wiped out a third of Europe’s population. To while away the time, they tell ten stories a day for ten days before returning to Florence. Decameron was the major inspiration for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which appeared at the end of the century.

The Black Plague, of course, was far, far worse than COVID-19, but there are similarities in how people respond. On the one hand, Boccaccio describes those who isolate themselves entirely from the rest of society:

Some there were who conceived that to live moderately and keep oneself from all excess was the best defense against such a danger; wherefore, making up their company, they lived removed from every other and shut themselves up in those houses where none had been sick and where living was best; and there, using very temperately of the most delicate viands and the finest wines and eschewing all incontinence, they abode with music and such other diversions as they might have, never suffering themselves to speak with any nor choosing to hear any news from without of death or sick folk.

Of course, not everyone can afford this option, but the mentality describes those who withdraw in panic.

Then there are those who go about convincing themselves that all is well:

Others…carouse and make merry and go about singing and frolicking and satisfy the appetite in everything possible and laugh and scoff at whatsoever befell was a very certain remedy for such an ill. That which they said they put in practice as best they might, going about day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking without stint or measure…

Boccaccio recommends “a middle course,” which involves using common sense but being careful:

Many others held a middle course between the two aforesaid, not straitening themselves so exactly in the matter of diet as the first neither allowing themselves such license in drinking and other debauchery as the second, but using things in sufficiency, according to their appetites; nor did they seclude themselves, but went about, carrying in their hands, some flowers, some odoriferous herbs and other some4 divers kinds of spiceries, which they set often to their noses, accounting it an excellent thing to fortify the brain with such odours, more by token that the air seemed all heavy and attainted with the stench of the dead bodies and that of the sick and of the remedies used.

To be sure, we no longer think that carrying flowers will work. (People used to think that the plague was conveyed through unpleasant smells.) But we can think of such a measure as the equivalent of washing our hands, not touching our faces, and avoiding large crowds.

One other detail from the introduction caught my eye as it suggests a reverse swine flu (a previous pandemic). If that one was passed from birds to humans through swine, Boccaccio describes an instance of swine infected by humans:

[N]ot only did it pass from man to man, but this, which is much more, it many times visibly did;—to wit, a thing which had pertained to a man sick or dead of the aforesaid sickness, being touched by an animal foreign to the human species, not only3 infected this latter with the plague, but in a very brief space of time killed it. Of this mine own eyes (as hath a little before been said) had one day, among others, experience on this wise; to wit, that the rags of a poor man, who had died of the plague, being cast out into the public way, two hogs came up to them and having first, after their wont, rooted amain among them with their snouts, took them in their mouths and tossed them about their jaws; then, in a little while, after turning round and round, they both, as if they had taken poison, fell down dead upon the rags with which they had in an ill hour intermeddled.

The young lords and ladies who retire to the villa model for us a healthy response: if the virus drives us into quarantine, we can use the found time to cultivate our minds and feed our souls. Picking up Decameron is not a bad option after all.

Previous posts on the coronavirus

Lady Macbeth: Hand Washing and the Coronavirus
Stephen King on How Pandemics Spread

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