Awarded two bags of red pears for delivering groceries to shut-ins, our daughter gave us one. I put them on a platter with a half-dozen avocados and two overripe apples. I immediately thought of Van Gogh and Cezanne still life paintings, and if I could paint, I would have done it – rich maroon pears, pebbly green-black pear-shaped avocados, apples fading red-to-yellow.
From there my mind went to “still life with coronavirus,” because we are still alive, still eating, walking, talking, breathing, even though the existence of every human on the planet is radically changed.
In the northern hemisphere, our lockdown parallels the coming of spring – redbuds and dogwoods here, plus whatever wildflowers or plantings one may have in their gardens. Forsythia and daffy-doodles are done, iris are budding. We will fill our bird feeders until the feed runs out, and here come the bugs of summer: butterflies, moths, bumblebees, wasps. My wife registered her first tick of 2020!
Being homebound lets us appreciate our situation. The work to keep our property under control is too much for us to manage, but if we lived in a big city, we’d run into infected people on every corner. It’s preferable to know you can’t keep all the undergrowth at bay than to know your neighbors may bring death to your door. The prediction is that big city folks may look for rural places to relocate is comforting, because we know we can’t keep up this place forever.
We’ve known this for a while, actually. We bought our rural property in our mid-fifties, when performing the manual labor was easier than now, in our mid-sixties. We have a lovely place, better’n any home we previously inhabited, and we have friends here, and community.
But community is also held at bay, except via an occasional phone call, email, video chat or chance meeting on a grocery run. We have each other, my wife and me and her 88-year old mom, who is trying to grasp the reality of worldwide shutdown.
To better understand it myself, I reread Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. Set in Oran, an Algerian seaport after World War II, The Plague foreshadows our current circumstances. Founded in medieval times overlooking the Mediterranean, surrounded by hills and desert on land, Oran has actual walls, so once the plague is recognized, its inhabitants are literally locked in, although if one has money, it is possible to smuggle in mail, hard to find foodstuffs, or potentially escape by sea.
Camus often refers to the situation as exile or prison, and his major characters – a doctor, a journalist, a priest, government functionaries and ordinary citizens – all have personal reasons for resisting on their own terms. The book opens when the doctor notices rats dying in the streets – bubonic plague was historically spread by fleas from rats to people.
As citizens sicken and die, the doctor tries to convince city leaders that immediate action must be taken or half the population will die. As we see in 2020, politicians are averse to being proactive, afraid to tell the truth, and let the epidemic get out of hand instead of following scientific knowledge.
Other predictable commonalities: rich people can afford to take precautions and live well; poor people must go to work and risk their health. The priest thunders a mighty sermon to scare people into prayer. Families are separated when their loved ones are hauled off to isolation wards, the crematorium, or quarantined in tents in a futbol stadium.
The doctor and police are hated for carrying out these decisions. Volunteers organize sanitary squads. The numbers rise and fall, and statisticians work to make sense of apparent randomness. (The term “flattening the curve” is actually used in this 1948 translation I got from the library.) Over time, people get restless and squabbles and riots break out.
In The Plague, a work of the imagination, however, the leader does not incite people to rebel, unlike our surreal country, which is fast becoming not only stranger than fiction but stranger than truth. Next up: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, published 1722. Maybe I will understand.
Kirk Ashworth