Journal of the Plague Year 6

Defoe refers to the experience of the plague as ‘a visitation,’ as if the disease arrived to London albeit uninvited, almost like the arrival of an unpleasant, even distant relative. Suddenly, you open the door at the bell and there was Cousin Fred on the doorstep with a Gladstone bag and wearing a backpack. He would be accommodated, he is family, but to yourself you groaned and wondered, how long would he stay? Oh, how badly would my life be disrupted! 
     When the plague visited London in 1665 the magistrates demanded the quarantine of the infected and set Watchmen before the houses of the sick to secure the City from the sick, but it was not a popular order; those living within the house had to remain in the house and they were not happy about the restriction. But the lock-down was necessary for the welfare of the community. “It is true, that the locking up the Doors of Peoples 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 remov’d from the Sick, looked very hard and cruel . . .” Requests were made to the Magistrates for exception to the restrictions, but the city’s leaders remained adamant. “But it was a publick good that justified the private mischief; and there was no obtaining the least Mitigation by any application to the Magistrates.” That is, to circumvent the lock-down people engaged in all manner of stratagems to circumvent the lock-down, but finally these ‘private mischiefs’ that would only exacerbate the condition of Plague and were stopped.
     Who decides on what is good for the public? Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” discusses the implications of two forms of liberty or freedom, words he uses interchangeably: “positive” and “negative” liberty. Negative liberty refers to the idea that an individual may not be interfered with in the exercise of his freedom, whereas positive liberty refers to the idea that in the exercise of my freedom I can do what I want. Now, the distinction is not so clear, though in his essay Berlin historicizes and explores the consequences of each version of freedom. Let me offer at least two distinct potentialities. What if in the exercise of my freedom I put another in danger: I want to drive my car at 100 miles per hour; or in the current pandemic I refuse to wear a mask or maintain social distance and therefore continue to spread the virus? Is it appropriate to restrict these personal freedoms? Not according to Jim Jordan, Republican congressperson from Ohio. And yet to insist that people wear masks, maintain social distancing and endure lockdowns does restrict a person’s freedom to do what s/he wants to do, and as we have seen often destroys businesses and lives. Is it appropriate to restrict these freedoms?
     If people were more aware of conditions; if they were better informed of current situations; if they were better educated, then it would not be necessary to coerce people by some external authority. To ensure this condition officials would have to establish institutions to ensure that rational considerations become a primary rationale for and determinant of action. Trump’s lies about the pandemic kept people in ignorance regarding the real threat from the coronavirus. Indeed, his own willed ignorance of conditions exacerbated an already fraught situation. Trump’s bravura regarding the wearing of masks called into question the warnings of scientists and medical personnel and led to super-spreader events that finally infected not only Trump but a large portion of White House staff and supporters who attended his mask-less rallies. Trump’s farcical and ignorant promises at the outset that the virus would soon be gone dangerously minimized the deadliness of the ‘visitation’ and led to the deaths of many who might have survived had they known better how to protect themselves and others and therefore chose to live with greater caution and more care. Isaiah Berlin offers this caveat: “ . . . we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt.” And he quotes Condorcet who wrote “Men still preserve the errors of their childhood, of their country and of their age long after having recognized all the truths needed for destroying them.” I have long considered that therapy should be required for all as are childhood vaccinations against tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps and polio, though it weill be acknowledged that a small minority legally opt out of such prophylaxis treatment. We do insist that children be educated mostly schools but alternatively at home to the age of at least sixteen years, but I have long bemoaned the advocacy of a curriculum that eschews rational exercise for the instant rewards of fulfilling limited quantifiable objectives.
     And what of negative liberty then? I remember clearly a professor complaining when the government had mandated the wearing of seat belts that his liberty to do as he pleased was denied. Well, yes, but this same man never refrained from buckling himself into an airplane seat. Or of people who objected to the banning of smoking in bars and public spaces. I expect the demand of a Stop sign be obeyed. The nature of society and communal living demands that freedoms require some regulation. Berlin writes, “The extent of a man’s or a people’s liberty to choose to live as he or they desire must be weighed against the claims of many other values, of which equality, or justice, or happiness, or security, or public order are perhaps the most obvious examples. For this reason, [freedom] cannot be unlimited.” I can live with that. So wear the mask. 

 

 

  

Journal of the Plague Year 5

When the pandemic began in earnest in March 2020, and it seemed as if we were going to be house-bound by mandate for some time, I went out one morning, even before masks were required, to the local coop and spent $150.00 on frozen foods and goods. I suppose that doesn’t seem like a great deal of money—on a good day I never depart from Whole Foods with less than $100.00 in the bags. But the latter consists usually fresh (even organic) produce and some cheeses and always potato chips. Perishables for the most part.  I already had sufficient toilet papers and napkins for a good while.
     On the same day and unbeknownst to me Elizabeth, too, took herself to the supermarkets and purchased $150.00 of frozen foods and goods in anticipation of the lock-down. She, too, already had a good year’s supply of toilet papers and napkins. And so in our respective homes we stored in our freezers a great quantity of supplies. 
     Now, neither of us were terribly fond of frozen food or instant dinners. For the most part my mother prepared cooked meals for us children with an occasional frozen chicken pot-pie surreptitiously brought in to what was supposed to be a strictly kosher home. Elizabeth grew up on frozen Swanson TV dinners and was loath to continue that practice. Besides, she enjoyed my cooking. And I have for years enjoyed the ritual of cooking accompanied to music, a glass or two of wine, beer or a tumbler of scotch. And I enjoy being alone in the kitchen making dinner. I am not a gourmet cook but I would say an honest and simple one. I am willing to devote up to a full hour to preparation. For the past almost 40 years I have been a vegetarian and require fresh produce for most of my dishes.
     I think I still eat too much like a peasant for whom food is mere sustenance and dinner not a calm, delicate social event: in the absence of a scheduled dinner party I gobble my cooked food down, usually to excess because I do enjoy my cooking, drink another glass or two of wine, and rise immediately from the table. I have been fortunate that over the past several years Elizabeth engages in clean-up, though I attempt as I cook to keep dirtied dishes to a minimum and to tidy up as I move along. 
     Despite the rush to eat and rise from the dining table, there is something about the preparation that settles me. Perhaps it is the isolation and the time to focus without interruption. Perhaps it is the energies devoted to the care of self that is involved in preparing a dinner. Perhaps it is the feeling of joy when the food prepared tastes well, good enough usually and even excellent at times. 
     But bringing frozen food to the table does not satisfy those joys that accompany the whole process of preparing, cooking and bringing meals to the table. Frozen food is taken from the freezer, removed from its packaging, placed in its disposable trays into the microwave oven for a zap of four to five minutes and voilá, there is dinner ready for the table, to be gobbled quickly down the entire process taking place inside of fifteen minutes. But it’s not the arriving, goes the cliché, but the journeying! And so when it became possible we shopped at the local Lund & Byerly’s during the early morning hour reserved for folks 65 years of age and older or at the older shoppers reserved early hour. And for the most part I cooked, and we ate well. For the most part the frozen foods languished in the freezer.
     Last night, fifteen months after it all began, we prepared the final package of frozen food—a cocktail hour portion of cheese-stuffed mushrooms, and Elizabeth commented that having been fully vaccinated it was fitting that our freezers were now empty of the foods purchased when the fears were at their height back then when no one knew what was to follow the early warnings. It might be a sign of something but of what we are not yet sure.  

Journal of the Plague Year 4

Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is not a journal of the plague year though a careful account of that difficult year is its content.. I didn’t keep a very careful daily account of this plague year either, a year that has now extended to fifteen months and will run, I suspect, at least through this summer. I might suggest that the Journal recounts the behaviors of people under great stress—the plague—and there was much from then that reminds me of now, and I might save much of that discussion for another day. But for now, at least . . . 
     As the Plague abates, the people began to return to London from places to which they had escaped. It was the rich and the privileged (some physicians and church officials) who had the resources to do so and the city was left with every day working people as well as the poor and indigent. And of those who fled and now returned, Defoe writes:

“ . . . that as upon the first Fright of the Infection, they shun’d one another, and fled from one another’s Houses, and from the City with an unaccountable, and, as I thought, unnecessary Fright,; so now upon this Notion spreading, . . . that the Distemper was not so catching as formerly, and that if it was catch’d, it was not so mortal , and seeing abundance of People who really fell sick, recover again daily; they took to such a precipitant Courage, and grew so entirely regardless of themselves, and of the Infection, that they made no more of the plague than of an ordinary Fever, nor indeed so much; they not only went boldly into company, with those who had Tumours and Carbuncles upon them, but eat and drank with them, nay into their Houses to visit them, and even, as I was told, into their very Chambers where they lay sick.  

That is, with evidence that the plague had decreased in virulence, in fact during the London plague outbreak the City had become partly deserted by those who could escape, and the remaining populace suffered quarantine and locked-in and had to await the passing of the Plague as it naturally ran its course: no vaccines or medicines existed to combat plague though there were at the time and continue even now to be no dearth of quack remedies offered as remedies for the infection. But as the infection decreased in virulence the people who had left abandoned caution and returned to the City and to their former lives as if nothing untoward had ever occurred; despite all cautions from physicians the people felt now free from concern about falling sick and returned to their exact lives as before the onset of the Plague. “[T}hey open’d Shops, went about the Streets, did Business and conversed with any Body that came in their way to converse with, whether with Business, or without, neither inquiring of their Health, or so much as being Apprehensive of any Danger from them, tho’ they knew them not to be sound.” 

            As we now vaccinate the population at this iteration of Plague, cautions again are abandoned. In fact, throughout the pandemic warnings had repeatedly been ignored by a portion of the population—and now more and more people have begun to return to a Life that they describe as Normal. The newspapers refer to this transition as a New Normal, but I don’t exactly know what that means. As I walk I pass young school children stand masked waiting at bus stops What exactly can Normal mean? Will it be Normal that children will grow and mature wearing masks at their social activities. One day I went walking and saw preschoolers in a play area sitting on the ground together wearing masks. What must they be thinking, I wondered: they must know they are wearing masks. Or will wearing masks be considered normal? I think that these children’s bodies will remember their experience and that the way that they will move physically through the world for their whole lives will show the effects of their mask-wearing during the pandemic. And from their bodies their minds will receive influence of mask-wearing. And there will be further consequences that we cannot yet imagine. 

Perhaps one thing I have learned from both Defoe’s Journal and my experience of the pandemic is that Normal had become a useless term. Restaurants may begin to serve indoors again; movie theaters may open and gyms may accept full occupancies. As for myself, I would love to have some skilled person trim my beard! But the experience of the plague suggests to me that from hereon I will forever look all about me for evidence of plague and will act accordingly. But I don’t yet know what that life might look or feel like. 

And I think the other thing I have (sadly) learned is that people really do not learn from experience. HF, Defoe’s narrator, suggests: “I wish I could say, that as the City had a new Face, so the Manners of the People had a new appearance . . . it must be acknowledged that the general practice of the People was just as it was before, and very little difference was to be seen.” Which suggests to me that the next plague resides within us still and only awaits its opportunistic moment to reappear. I have only to hear the rantings of someone like Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio to despair of the future for our children.

 

Journal of the Plague Year 3

 

Today the death toll from the pandemic has slowed, and though the various vaccines are inoculating the citizenry against the virus, too many have refused the medicine and spread false information about the origin and effectiveness of the vaccines. Other citizens have renounced all caution and have taken to gathering in crowds and called for an immediate return to a normal they lived before the outbreak of the deadly virus. And it is not true that that this pandemic will not end, or at least, so we hope, but it is also true that what we have known as normal will never return. As Chief Plenty Coups said after the buffalo had gone, after this, nothing happened. The very ways that we have defined out selves and our world will be no longer viable, and we do not know how to go on though we will do so. And there will always be pestilence of one sort or another. The present incidence of plague ought to remind us that life could and almost certainly will be suddenly uprooted and set adrift. Though too large a segment of today’s population lives in denial, it is true that we will not return to normal ever. Dr Rieux, the narrator in Camus’s The Plague, admits, “No one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.” We will not ever be as free as once we believed.

     Our present situation portends that the future will be severed from the past. We do not know what will happen now that the buffalo have disappeared. Once we have experienced plague, there is no escaping the fear of its inevitable recurrence; our daily lives must reflect that realization or again we shall suffer plague in ignorance and helplessness. As the plague in Oran declined in intensity and the city began to return to some sense of normalcy, Dr. Rieux paid a call on a patient of his, an older man. That patient complained that too many of the townspeople would attribute their hardships to the plague and that with its dissipation all will be well again. The old man says, “All those folks are saying: ‘It was plague.’ We’ve had the plague here.’ You’d almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what does that mean—‘plague’? Just life, no more than that.” Or as Roseanne Roseannadanna remarked, “Well, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.” That understanding can be paralyzing or it can be instructive. Tarrou, another character in The Plague says, “I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to ease being plague-stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace, failing that, a decent death.” For Tarrou there has been nothing to be learned from the tragic experience except that each of us already possesses plague—and that plague can and must be resisted. This reflects the Rabbis’ understanding of the value of suffering: neither it nor its rewards need be prized. But from suffering and from the plague one can learn a stance in the world: not to remain innocent but to accept responsibility. 

For our children, the world that once they inhabited has been irrevocably altered. The world may look the same but it is not so. Attention must be paid. Years earlier, William James adjured teachers, “We must teach our children to pay attention, by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies that are there. To think, in short, is the secret of the will, just as it is the secret of memory.” To follow an idea demands attention to will. Tarrou says, “What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.” I think we might address that will and teach our children well. From the scattered fragments of ourselves and our world we can begin to construct new subjectivities as Adrienne Rich (1972) suggested in “Diving into the Wreck,” 

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

Or we might urge with Tennyson’s Ulysses, “Come, my friends, Tis not too late to seek newer worlds.” (Come, Watson, the game’s afoot! 

Our present experience with the COVID-19 virus will certainly result in a world considerably changed from the one in which our subjectivities were first formed. It is not that this present pandemic will not end, but neither will it ever end. The life we once lived will not—should not—return to a prior normal. There will remain a great deal of uncertainty and fear lurking yet about. And perhaps there exists an irony at the heart of this pandemic. In the chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Thoreau writes, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” During this time of shuttered doors and social distancing, if we have been paying attention, we have been learning what may be essential for our lives and what is no longer so for our lives. Thoreau measured that, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” We might have been learning during the pandemic what we really do need and of what we can let go. For the sake of our lives in these times we have forgone many things, decided that our lives should not be exchanged for them, and again, perhaps, have begun to live a different life— though as of yet we cannot know of what that life might ultimately consist. These beliefs might serve as one source of a radical hope: a belief in a future that we cannot imagine, a future that might consist of what we do not know after the buffalo disappeared and then nothing happened.