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.