Week Three

Having read about plague for years—Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Camus’ The Plague, several historical accounts in books and articles concerning the Black Plague in Europe, even one more recently in The London Review of Books recounting the experience of the plague in Florence, Italy; I am more than a bit surprised to discover myself living through a plague-like pandemic (a redundancy?)  that has basically shuttered the world. Economies have collapsed, stores are shuttered, places of congregating have been rendered empty. The shelves of supermarkets are often spare and the often masked shoppers keep six feet distant and look warily about wondering “Who has it?” We watched the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers last week and I considered that we are now living it. And you who philosophize, disgrace . . . Trump belatedly acknowledges the enormity of the crisis but assumes absolutely no responsibility for the government’s lethargic and unwilling response to the threat!

     I contacted my health care providers not because I was ill but because I was concerned about their healths. Both responded that despite the strain they remained in good health and both doctors expressed hope that either Jehovah or the Lord (depending on their particular faiths) would help us through this crisis. I thought it an odd response, frankly. They hoped some God would bring some relief without considering that the God on whom they looked for succor from the plague was the same God who had the power to inflict the plague on the Earth. Their God was only the God of healing and health and never the God of plague and destruction. Despite Walt Whitman, I don’t think the contradiction is viable. Rather, I turn to Emmanuel Levinas’ thoughts in “To Love the Torah More than God.” He writes “The condition in which victims find themselves in a disordered world that is to say, in a world where goodness does not succeed in being victorious, is suffering. This reveals a God who, while refusing to manifest Himself in any way as a help, directs His appeal to the full maturity of the integrally responsible person.” Their work as doctors will help us through this plague. Ours is certainly a disordered world exacerbated all the more so at this horrific moment of plague, and certainly if there is a God then that God does not reveal itself. And if I believed in a god then it would be an invisible one that could only manifest itself in the face of the Other. But I am no longer convinced . . .

     This is the third week of social distancing and isolation and thoughts turn more morbid than merry.