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Re-reading Camus

Re-reading Camus

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Once we went into lockdown in March, the battered old copy I have of Albert Camus’s The Plague was much on my mind. Part of me wanted to re-read it. I’d always liked the book, ever since I read it in college and taught it in high school. I thought it was profound — and that was before we were in a worldwide pandemic. But another part of me wondered, why do I want to read a book about a plague when I’m living through one?

The glutton-for-punishment part of me won out. I re-read the book — and am glad I did, even though cracking the volume open and turning pages guaranteed its destruction. When I began reading, my copy was hanging together not by a thread but by some errant glue that had not yet dried and flaked away. After I finished, the book was essentially a sheaf of loose-leaf pages. But that was okay; killing a book by reading it seems an outcome that an existentialist like Camus would have appreciated.
But beyond the mechanics of reading — the gentle way I had to handle the paperback, as if holding the hand of a dying victim — there was the content, which was both comforting and illuminating. Yes, we are suffering from a devastating coronavirus. But it’s at least not the bubonic plague. There are no buboes to lance, no dying rats to herald the crisis. 
There were passages that could have been written yesterday, so clearly did they plumb the human heart in a time of mass contagion and illness. “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise,” Camus wrote, at the beginning of the novel. And, toward the end, he said this: “Whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and … exacerbated the sense of injustice.” 
And then, there is this passage at the end, which I noted a few months ago and will always give me shivers: “He [Dr. Rieux] knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedroom cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
Left with a Melody

Left with a Melody

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Like so much else these days, deciding whether to go to church is fraught with questions. Since last week, we have been allowed to attend in person, but seating is limited and the experience is so different that I think I would miss Mass more sitting there than I would watching it on my laptop.

Which is why I keep tuning in … as evidenced by yesterday’s post.  It’s imperfect, but the experience still leaves me with something to think about, and, maybe just as important, something to listen to.

Yesterday, it was “Let All Who Are Thirsty Come,” a haunting melody that stayed with me as I swept the deck and mowed the yard and walked through the June afternoon.

Left with a melody … there is a power and a purpose in that.

Reinvention

Reinvention

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Reinvention is in the air, new ways of being and doing things. Many of them seem flat to me, necessary evils, the now-familiar checkerboard of faces in Zoom squares.

But there are benefits, too. Free classes, curbside services, a keener appreciation of the here-and-now, of how important it is to be strong of body and healthy of mind. I’ve just attended yet another remote Mass, one enlivened by the priest, who began intoning the Sign of Peace (where we shake each other’s hands), only to say, “Oh, that’s right, you can’t do that anymore.”

Experimentation can bring smiles or exasperated sighs. I’m hoping I can go with the former most of the time.

Through trial and error and reinvention we come to know each other better — and perhaps this, too, can be an avenue of love.

100,000

100,000

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Yesterday, the number of deaths in this country from the novel coronavirus hit 100,000, so I spent some time this morning reading obituaries.

There were teachers and writers and veterans. Nurses and doctors, pharmacists and paramedics. A Broadway costume designer, a jazz trumpeter, a detective and a World War II veteran. There were husbands and wives who died within days of each other.

Each life precious, just as every life is. Each life giving us a glimpse of the faces behind these numbers. Each life representing a web, a cascade, of losses.

The reading of obituaries could become an obsession in the age of coronavirus. I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum. But today, of all days, seemed an appropriate one to honor the dead in this way. To know their stories, to celebrate their lives.

Brilliant Air

Brilliant Air

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Up early for a walk in a luminous fog that seemed to be glowing from the inside out. It was as if the pinpointed radiance of a rising sun was smashed and diffused throughout the air.

Air we now see differently than we did a few months ago. A miasma, virus drops in an aerosol of danger.

But this morning the air was an invisibility cloak, a brilliant one that hid me (or at least I pretended it did) in a mantle of unknowing, so I could stride beneath the dripping oaks and into another day.

Speeding Along

Speeding Along

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There are fewer cars on the road than this time three months ago — but more on the road than this time last week. And many of the automobiles out there are apparently speeding.

Not to condone these scofflaws but I can understand the lure of empty pavement. It’s such a departure from our normal state of affairs (see above).

I found myself putting the pedal to the metal a few weeks ago when driving down an almost empty Dulles Toll Road. But I slowed down after I spotted this sign:

“Speeding tickets available ahead.”

At least the police had a sense of humor about it.

After This?

After This?

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Sometimes I try to envision what our lives will be like coming out of this. I believe that eventually, once there’s a vaccine and treatment, they will be somewhat the same. More chastened, more grateful, I hope, but similar to what we used to have. People are social creatures, after all. We want to be together.

But until we feel safe doing that, we will wear masks and stay mostly to ourselves. This is a poverty. It’s a shrinking of our lives rather than an expansion of them. It’s hard to stay aware of all the possibilities the world holds while we’re in this cloistered state.


The life we had is a world I miss every day; we all do. A world we lost so quickly, almost with the hair-trigger quickness of a bomb exploding. All it took was a wily, tenacious pathogen.

What I hope most of all is that this pathogen, like so much else, doesn’t succeed in pushing us farther apart, but instead pulls us together. All evidence suggests that it will split us up. But I’m an optimist; I like to believe that common sense and human kindness will prevail.

Possible Again?

Possible Again?

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Warmth has been slow to arrive this year, so as I listen to the furnace purr, I’m reliving travels to steamier climes, from the white sand beach of Siesta Key, Florida, to the dark, broad beach at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.

I’m remembering the feeling of sand in my toes and the lap of surf in my ears. I’m dreaming of a world where traveling to these places is possible again.

I must need a vacation or something!

Not Complaining

Not Complaining

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Somehow, there is still moisture in the sky, and rain in the air. It’s falling now in gentle sheets, greening the new leaves and the grass and the weeds, making us feel more hemmed in than we already do.

Not that I’m complaining. There’s a roof over my head, and the basement doesn’t flood every time it rains, only in downpours. There’s electricity so I can turn on lamps in the morning (something I’ve very much needed to do this gray day).

And in the kitchen, just steps away from where I now sit (on a comfy new couch, I might add), there is more food than we know what to do with.

So I will take this rainy day, embrace it and even (in my own way) celebrate it. Because that’s where we are now … or at least it’s where I hope to be.

(Sunrise on the Mekong … from the vault.)

Missing the Derby

Missing the Derby

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For the first time since 1945 there was no Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. There were no thoroughbreds thundering down the back stretch at Churchill Downs. There were, I hear, some fans — many wearing fancy hats — who couldn’t stay away. They appeared, crowned and masked, to traipse around the track and take photos of vacant betting windows and empty paddocks.

We’ve lost many of our traditional markers this spring. No tournament basketball in March, no first day of baseball in April. And now … no Derby in May — to be followed by no Preakness or Belmont, either, at least for the time being.

Of all the pain, sadness and disruption brought on by this pandemic this is hardly the greatest. But for this transplanted Kentuckian, who has never missed a Derby either live (twice) or televised (every other time), it was a loss indeed.