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.