Journal of the Plague Year 2

I guess I don’t know how this will all end. I am not even sure that it will all end. So, let me see where we are in these present moments. I think this Sunday will begin the fifty-fourth week of what has come to termed The Pandemic: the sheltering-in-place and the imperative for social distancing, the wearing of facemasks and latex gloves out in the streets and the marketplaces. The directive demands that we keep six feet between us: ironically, I consider, also the depth of a grave. I have learned that the legal deepness of the grave harkens back to the infestation of the Plague in London in 1665 when the Lord Mayor and his council mandated that graves of the dead be dug to that measure!  Though the restrictions are easing and the death toll is slowing, in the United States more that 550,000 people have already died of the corona virus; across the world almost 4 million have succumbed. And now the threat of virus variants threaten the recovery. In the United States thousands of businesses have permanently closed and thousands more have dramatically altered their daily operations. Vaccines are available for those who want them, but too many refuse for various reasons.
     I do not know for how much longer this will go on. The global economy has ground to a halt, and though I suspect that it will rebound, its decline reminds me how fragile are our financial securities. Today’s news reports that million in the United States have applied for unemployment benefits so far, many of whom may never be called back to work. The burden has fallen most heavily on those least able to bear it. The restaurants, the bookstores, the shoe stores, the hair salons and barber shops; the coffee houses, the health clubs, the religious institutions; schools and universities— all, all have been shuttered for more than a year. Educational organizations have turned to online delivery systems, and I fear that what might be ultimately learned from these methodologies will only reveal how much money can now be saved by eliminating actual classrooms. I do not doubt who will ultimately benefit from these savings. School bookrooms will become obsolete, supplies of paper and writing utensils will disappear, online classes will be available only to those with the financial resources to maintain internet access, laboratory experiences will be lost, and conversations will be negotiated through heavily mediated programs that will compromise spontaneity and silence trial and error classroom talk. School have begun to reopen after almost a year of being closed, but many children will remain home for fear of infection. And all have lost a year.
     We have been torn today from our daily lives and living. Those of us who will be fortunate to survive will experience the world into which we reenter as fundamentally changed. We will have changed. Camus presciently describes one of the most serious effects of the current pandemic. The narrator of The Plague, Dr. Rieux, refers to the experience of forced isolation in the plague-infested city of Oran as exile—what we today call self-quarantine and sheltering in place. And from this situation, we, like the townspeople of Rieux’s Oran, have come to know “the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners in exile, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose” (Camus 1948, p. 73). Because our pasts can now offer little instruction for our lives in the present, the presence of plague has irrevocably changed our lives. Our pasts will no longer serve as a viable influence on the future. Vague as any future might inevitably be, we nevertheless normally would expect that the future should remain continuous with some part of the past. But today this is no longer true. David Brooks has written in The New York Times, “Everywhere I hear the same refrain: We’re standing at a portal to the future; we’re not going back to how it used to be.” But no one can say where we might be going or how we might do so. We might teach the past, but not as a roadmap for the future. What Rieux says of separated lovers living in exile may be true as well for today’s citizens: “Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them” (Camus 1948, p. 182). Citizens today exist as if they live on an island. Perhaps the growing complaints concerning the shut-down, and eventually the increasingly desperate violent protests to reopen, reflect the delusional belief that a return to normal is possible. But such behavior reflects a basic misunderstanding of the present. This present will soon disappear into an unrecoverable past. As exiles we are condemned to a present that now (an ironic term itself) exists out of context. I think the situation is worse than it might have been for Tantalus: we cannot even be tempted . . . we feel hopeless.

 

Journal of the Plague Year

So much occurred during this Plague Year when actually nothing happened. I should have been a better record keeper—but I had no idea that it would all last so long. I imagined that Daniel Defoe had kept a regular account of that tragic year when the bubonic plague struck London, but I learned, in fact, that the Journal of the Plague Year was not written during the 1665 outbreak when Defoe was only five years old but had been penned (literally) many years later and just before its publication in 1722. I think to have kept a record might have been an excellent project for me during this time, but alas, like so many excellent projects I have considered ex post facto, this one never got underway. So I’m writing my journal of the plague year now though it is not ended and has extended beyond a year. And having now received the second dose of the Moderna vaccine and received permission by the CDC to even organize dinner parties with other seniors who have been fully vaccinated, now and thinking that the severe isolation that I have experienced might be coming to a slow conclusion, I would like to consider what happened when, to quote Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow nation, that after this, nothing happened. 
     Maybe I’ll begin with what seemed to be a somewhat quiet and even inauspicious beginning. In late January or early February, the alarm began to sound that something was in the air and people were advised to wash their hands frequently and for 20 seconds whenever they came in from out there, in order to to kill whatever virus may have settled on them. We were also advised to use hand sanitizers. But soon these preventative lotions very soon came to short supply. I remember sometime in early February, 2020 standing naked in the gym locker and talking casually with a man whom I knew to be a pharmacist in a local hospital. I wondered to him if his pharmacy had been cleared of the sanitizers and he laughed and then acknowledged that a new supply was not even forthcoming He admitted to what was becoming common knowledge: the demand for the item was enormous and that the prices would rise even as the supply dwindled. Pacé Smith and Marx. And then, indeed, the supply actually disappeared and a container of sanitizer of whatever size became as valuable as prime real estate.
     Instructions on how to mix a sanitizer in the home appeared and I remember walking with Madeleine through the health care section of Whole Foods looking for the required substances but being informed that they were sold out of all the items and probably wouldn’t be receiving any more for several weeks. Pharmacy shelves were also clean of the necessary ingredients as well as the pre-mixed product. The next option for protection against the virus was plastic gloves; we purchased a large box of them which we slipped on whenever we went out and even when we stayed in and had to put out the trash or bring in the morning newspaper, got the mail or received packages mostly from the now essential Amazon.com. When we did venture out into the Senior Citizen Hour at the local supermarket, a supply of plastic gloves in S-M-L and XL sizes were offered de rigeur, and from their own coveted supplies newly hired store workers sanitized the shopping carts. Sterility was at a premium. Wall hand sanitizers began to appear in the aisles and at the cash registers and the entry and exit doors. When we got home and if we were fortunate to have even a small supply of sanitizer we wiped down our items and the packagings. And then we washed our hands for twenty seconds and tried to keep our touching anything to an antiseptic minimum.
     And so, I think that one consequence of the pandemic was the transformation of everything in the world into strains of toxicity. Nothing could anymore be safely touched without first donning protective gloves and without a necessary supply of sanitizer. Even our physical bodies were dangerous, and the cautions not to touch our eyes, our face, or mouth appeared everywhere. The physical world, always a bit precarious, had now become quite deadly. No hugs and kisses. No hands shaken. Social distancing of six feet maintained between individuals. The virus was everywhere, and even each of us could be the deadly carrier.