Refusing to Be on the Side of Pestilence

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:
‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

– Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

—

When I was growing up, a favorite book in my house was Frederick, the story about a little field mouse who, while his friends gather food for the winter, spends his time gathering rays of sunshine and colors and other intangible things. Though the other mice scorn him for not preparing properly, when the winter comes, it is Frederick who saves them. After all, one needs more than just food to survive the winter: one needs hope, and Frederick and the memories he has been gathering are ready to offer just that.

Frederick has been on my mind a great deal the past week, as I have duly gone to the stores and stocked up what my roommate and I will need to get through the next few weeks—at least—with minimal contact with the outside world. With him in mind, I added baking supplies and new ingredients to my shopping cart, and I visited our local bookshop to pick up new reads and a puzzle. And with him in mind, I looked at the books I had already amassed and thought that, yes, perhaps this is why I have been stockpiling them—so that in a moment of need, as this surely is, I would have with me already the comfort of so many people and so many stories.

But the other lesson that Frederick offers is that it’s not enough to have gathered these stories—in the hour of need, the action that matters is that he shares them. And so, for the next few weeks, as I work my way through my own collection, I thought that perhaps I would share what I was reaching for, that it might offer someone else comfort, too.

—

The first book I thought of when the COVID-19 situation started to get serious in New York was, of course, Camus’s The Plague, which has already sold out at one of my favorite bookstores down on 72^nd Street (and probably more places, only I don’t follow them on Facebook). I first read The Plague the summer before my senior year of high school, and I loved it instantly for its thesis, that “what we learn in times of pestilence [is] that there are more things to admire in men than despise.” It was not until many years later, when reading Tony Judt’s ruminations on the lesson The Plague could give post-9/11 New York, that I realized I had missed Camus’s final warning: that even so, one must always be ready for plague to arise again in their time, and in their own happy city. I had not, until these past few weeks, fully heeded that warning.

Turning to it again now, I am struck this time by the pain of Dr. Rieux himself, which is both unique and universal. He sends his wife out of Oran just as the plague begins, because she herself is ill and needs treatment. For him, the quarantine simply enforces a separation already in place. He says nothing of the matter to his friends, nor does he complain, and when bad news comes, he simply tells his mother “not to cry, he’d been expecting it, but it was hard all the same.” Camus continues, in a devastating show of the doctor’s empathy, that Rieux “knew, in saying this, that this suffering was nothing new. For many months, and for the last two days, it was the self-same suffering going on and on.”

But in spite of this statement, it is a different suffering, perhaps, to carry on dealing with a crisis when you know that your loved ones are also in danger elsewhere. For those who were separated by the quarantine in allegorical Oran, there could be some bare comfort in the knowledge that those outside of Oran’s borders were safe. For those in real-life Vichy France, upon whose experiences The Plague is based, there could be far less comfort. And for those of us today, who are far from our families or our loved ones, we are beginning to understand that the best thing any of us can do is to do what is needed, as Dr. Rieux does, and to muster our empathy, accepting that our pain, though unique in its own ways, is in fact the shared grief of billions.

—

There have been an awful lot of allusions to World War II in the last few weeks. When ruing the selfishness of those who are still crowding restaurants and bars, people have bemoaned the fact that Americans today lack the sense that we’re all in this together, that our political opponents are not our true enemies. They have also pointed to the deterioration of our generation by hearkening back to the British response to the Blitz, reminding us of old war posters and modifying the famous slogans (my personal favorite: Keep Calm and (Don’t) Carry On). Leaders across the world have identified the fight against COVID-19 as a war, one which we can fight all together, instead of fighting each other. “Your grandparents were called to war,” goes one meme floating around this week. “You’re being called on to sit on your couch.”

There is some truth in all of this, but we can never trust the past to offer us simple narratives. Much as Americans like to reduce World War II to a war between good and evil, we too committed atrocities. And what is happening now, too, is not that simple. Diseases don’t discriminate, but we do. We had an international plan in place to respond to this situation, but no one is using it. And we have let our democracy fall into the hands of an egomaniac who has taken just about every wrong turn possible on the road to containment and triage. He is a symptom, but the death of our democracy and the draining of empathy from our society is our collective failure. Had we seen the warning signs sooner, perhaps we could have saved millions of lives.

The books that I look to in times of crisis include, always, The Lord of the Rings and The Once and Future King, books written by the World War I generation as they grappled with the coming of a second war. They offer sweeping responses to our current predicament, framed in grand terms of good and evil. These are important messages of endurance to carry with us. But I include, too, the books about smaller stories: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, for instance. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Mary Oliver’s Dream Work. Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, and, more recently, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age. These are the smaller stories, the ones about the warning signs. These are the ones that teach us about empathy and what it means to choose to do the decent thing even when no one is watching, even when the consequences are small.

When we emerge from the other side of this darkness, we will be faced with a choice. We can go back to life as it was, with all of its glamor and convenience and all of its cruel, deadly pitfalls. Or we can be a little gentler and be a little kinder, and allow the worst of this experience to shape a better path forward. The former would be easier, for it would allow us to forget how we got here and focus solely on the evil we have overcome. The latter will require that we remember this period in all its complexity and that we see the tragedy along with the triumph. It is a daunting task, but at this moment of quarantine, we, like Frederick, have been given the time to store our memories.

—

For my family. I love you, and although I can’t be with you in body, know that I’m with you in spirit.

Title taken from The Plague: “All I can say is that there are pestilences and there are victims—and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.”