Will Love Someday Rise Out Of This, Too? (#4)
I. Hypochondria
The time is April 2021. Even voicing the syllables "twenty-twenty—" is enough to conjure the visage of COVID-19. Three million people have been pronounced dead via the virus; over five hundred thousand in the United States alone. And there is little doubt that the developing world is drastically undercounting cases and deaths.
I am writing this after having been completely vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The 2nd shot made me feel worse than any pathogen I had been exposed to in the past two years.
My guess is the names of the vaccines will fade into memory as routine booster shots become an annual or twice-annual requirement to participate in society. We'll get more research that proves that mRNA vaccines are truly as miraculous as they seem, or that they come with some nasty side effects only visible over the long-term. Slowly, medical science will converge on the best practices for vaccinating against coronaviruses.
Becoming sick has turned into even more of a chore than it used to be. You are expected to tell everyone you have been in contact with whether you have a low grade fever, or a tickle in your throat, or even if you just feel a little off. In the pre-COVID world, only hypochondriacs monitored every itch, twitch, and tinge the way we all do now. I have to count the number of days since my last symptoms appeared just so I can report back to work after a negative COVID test. God help me when allergy season starts in May. Strangely, even though I was—hopefully I can say that now—a hypochondriac, I was like Cottard in The Plague: I felt better just because I was not alone, that everyone was in the same boat as I was.
It is uncontroversial to say that COVID-19 is a thunderbolt that marks the end of "The End of History." We thought ourselves masters over nature, and were shown just how humble we really are. But as two great 20th century novels show, disease has been an essential foil for life for centuries. Indeed, to be sick is to be alive, just as we must all die of some sickness.
Albert Camus's The Plague is an intimate portrait of one doctor's fight against an outbreak of, you guessed it, the bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is a hefty modernist novel that starts with our hero planning to visit his cousin's alpine tuberculosis sanatorium for three weeks before starting a new job, but ends up staying for seven years, leaving only when the Great War causes all the residents to flee their neutral Swiss haven for the borders of their own empires. Both novels have been analyzed as allegories for European politics: The Magic Mountain's sanatorium as a model for prewar Europe, The Plague's plague as the Nazi occupation of France. I am not interested in this political allegory; instead, I want to analyze the novels' relationship to the object-level problem, sickness.
II. It Can't Happen Here
The opening of The Plague is uncannily similar to our pandemic. Hundreds of rats come out of hiding in Oran just to die. The townspeople are vexed at a death count of 6,231 rats collected and burned in a single day. It is treated as a curiosity, much as those of us in the West looked at the lockdown in Wuhan in late December 2019. (To modern readers reading a book called The Plague, we know that rats are a portent of plague — they are famously the cause of the Black Death. It is a wonder that none of Camus's characters comment on this. Perhaps they don't believe that an outbreak of plague could happen to them.) There is a seasoned doctor who tells Dr. Rieux that he knows that the disease is plague, but Rieux waves him off even after conceding that all signs point to it being plague. The old doctor knows that calling it by its name will present a problem: he predicts that the leadership will tell them that the plague "vanished from temperate countries long ago." The meeting of the health committee at the city Prefect's office could be written by anyone with a memory of January and February 2020: doctors debating how contagious the disease is because people who live in the same household haven't been affected by it, the hesitation to calling the disease by its name because that would compel the city to take drastic precautions. In fairness, the townsfolk are no different:
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally like surprise... In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away, and from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.
As the plague spreads, Oran goes from tabulating deaths per week to deaths per day. The city closes its gates and prevents anyone from entering or leaving to prevent the spread of the pandemic to the outside world. There is a peppermint lozenge shortage in the drugstores due to a superstition that it can help ward off the plague. Tarrou, a traveler who has come to stay in Oran temporarily, proposes forming a citizens' sanitation squad to help lift the burden from authorities. The sanitary squad puts themselves in harm's way to deal with the remains of the victims of the plague. Our narrator tells us dryly that the sanitation squad should not be praised too much, for they are merely doing their moral duty to fight the disease. In our narrator's words: "there was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical." Confronting death is, to Camus, the very essence of life.
To me, reading The Plague in October 2020, the sanitation squads evoked a sense of Quixotic naiveté because I associated them with the "hygiene theater" of our pandemic. There were shortages of hand sanitizer so significant that distilleries started manufacturing it. In my office, anonymous cleaners would spray down your desk with some mysterious solution while you were in the bathroom, so you'd return to your seat and find it damp, which is nobody's idea of reassuring. Those of us with longer memories can remember now-famous infectious disease experts telling us that all we needed to do was keep calm and wash our hands. It was obvious to anyone paying attention to the details at the time is that there was no way that surfaces (fomites) were the primary vector of transmission of COVID. And yet, industry dutifully followed the public health authorities in increased sanitation efforts just so they could look like they were doing something to fight the virus and, crucially, make it more safe for people to spend their dollars at their accommodations. In other words, these sanitation efforts were just another marketing campaign.
Tarrou's sanitation squads are different for a critical reason: the primary ways that bubonic plague spreads are via flea bites (from, say, handling rat corpses) and via the body fluids of those infected with plague (from, say, handling human corpses). By cleaning up contaminated waste, Tarrou's men are actually helping to stop the spread of the plague. Hygiene theater didn't. In a pandemic, the mechanism of transmission matters greatly — it is the only lever we have to stop the spread. The narrator describes how the plague led to the crash of the economy, and as people were laid off from work, they applied to be part of the sanitation squads:
Many of the gravediggers, stretcher-bearers, and the like, public servants to begin with, and later volunteers, died of plague. However stringent the precautions, sooner or later contagion did its work... But, paradoxically enough, once the whole town was in the grip of the disease, its very prevalence tended to make things easier, since the disorganization of the town's economic life threw a great number of persons out of work... The sanitary authorities always had a waiting-list of applicants for work; whenever there was a vacancy the men at the top of the list were notified, and unless they too had laid off work for good, they never failed to appear when summoned.
It is jarring to read this in light of the economic devastation that was unleashed by COVID-19. As if we could not have done anything to enlist our fellow citizens in the fight against the virus. To be fair, COVID is very difficult to contain because it spreads by aerosol and is effectively airborne. But if we wanted to rewind the clock to January of last year, we could have invoked the Defense Production Act to produce enough N95s for all citizens and worked to recruit employees from the ranks of the newly unemployed. Taiwan managed to scale up mask production quickly (though mostly surgical masks, sadly). But the point is — we should have put the power of those whose lives were wrecked by the virus to work in building defenses against it. Maybe we could have had people distributing box fans with attached MERV filters. Or manufacturing more air filters and subsidizing air purifier purchases.
By contrast, the social cohesion we see in Oran seems to be a relic from a previous time. Dr. Rieux himself is a neighborhood doctor who goes out on rounds, visiting patients in their homes. That is a far cry from our healthcare system, where patients have to visit their "care providers." Our system showed its detachment from the people that it was ostensibly caring for when it famously denounced masks as useless for the proles but was vital PPE for healthcare workers. Maybe we would show similar levels of social cohesion if confronted with a disease that had a fatality rate of 50%. COVID-19 was a perfect storm: a very long incubation period; asymptomatic spread; a relatively low overall fatality rate, but a sharp increase in mortality with age; spread primarily by aerosols instead of by respiratory droplets or surfaces. It is difficult to imagine a virus that would be designed any better to disrupt our way of life.
Even Oran begins to struggle with the plague when it turns from primarily bubonic to pneumonic. Those infected with pneumonic plague spread the disease via respiratory droplets, much like the flu, COVID-19, and tuberculosis. In the absence of significant improvements in ventilation, the only way to truly prevent an airborne disease from spreading is to isolate ourselves.
III. Lockdown
Hans Castorp, the ironic hero of The Magic Mountain, submits to a kind of lockdown as a vacation. He joins his cousin Joachim in the Berghof tuberculosis sanatorium, secluded in the Swiss Alps near Davos, to take a break from the world before entering the real world of work as a shipbuilding engineer. The Berghof is isolated from what Hans and the residents call the "flatlands," the land down below. To them, sickness is a reprieve from the active life. The members of the sanatorium come and go, oscillating between the flatlands and the Berghof, withdrawing when the demands of normal life are too unbearable. The Berghof itself is a kind of underworld, a waystation between life and death. Residents of the Berghof still die; Hans himself witnesses the fumigation of dormitory rooms when their residents have drawn their last breath. It is Director Behrens, who the arch-humanist Ludovico Settembrini calls Rhadamanthus, who sits in judgment of them all, with his x-ray machine able to image their ravaged lungs. As time passes, Hans becomes more detached from life in the flatlands, and is instead taken up with living deep in contemplation, "playing king."
The ironic distance that Mann's narrator maintains allows the reader to be deceived much in the way Hans deceives himself. We see Hans's defenses break down as he assimilates to the Berghof's way of life. When Hans first arrives, he loses the ability to taste his favorite cigars that he special orders from Bremen, and is profoundly disturbed that their pleasure is denied his senses. His sleep on the first night is disturbed by the noisy copulation of the Russians in the adjacent dorm room; he complains that the walls are paper-thin. In a matter of weeks, the other patients mock him for his infatuation with Claudia Chauchat — and he is totally oblivious to their mockery as he blatantly stares at the apple of his eye through all five daily meals, indifferent to all else. Hans originally responded with indignation to Claudia's door-slamming; in his infatuation he comes to love it, because it is the signal that the object of his desire has arrived. And of course, around the same time, as Hans passes from visitor to patient, his cigars regain their savor.
We are led to believe that Hans hardly decides to extend his stay in the Berghof; he is passively doing it out of medical prudence. Joachim and Settembrini tell him to retreat back to the "plains" before being ensnared by Behrens, but Behrens identifies a "moist spot" in Hans's chest during a free consultation and links it to the fever that Hans experienced since the day he arrived. Hans starts taking his temperature six times daily, holding the thermometer in his mouth for seven minutes before consulting the mercury. And he always shows a slight fever. But it seems clear that Hans himself has tuberculosis. It is shown by the X-ray Behrens obtains after Hans has stayed for seven weeks. But the tools the Berghof uses to treat its patients are primitive — the primary treatment technique is time. Behrens gives his patients recovery time estimates—just another six or eight or ten or twelve weeks, he says. These estimates never turn out to be realistic. Behrens is like the building contractor who tells you everything will be done in just another two weeks. His patients have to rebel like Joachim to leave the Berghof. Behrens sits in judgment, but he is powerless when pushed, because he knows that the tuberculosis — and his patients — will return. Behrens's phony estimates are similar to the "flatten the curve" rhetoric that was conveniently forgotten as soon as it became clear that we had no way out of the pandemic without incredibly strict lockdowns that we lacked the political will and capacity to implement, or vaccines. Time as a recovery strategy is admitting that you have no power to prevent the disease from spreading.
Hans is not like Joachim, because he is willing to submit to Behrens's dictates while pretending to himself that he is above them. Behrens cannily perceives this, telling Hans, "I knew at once that you'd be a better patient than visitor, with more talent for being ill than our brigadier general (Joachim) here, who tries to slip away the moment his fever goes down a tenth or two." Hans's talent at being a patient lies in his ability to conform to the routine of the Berghof: the five daily meals, the rest cures on the balcony in his oh-so-comfortable lounge chair, the check-ups and psychoanalysis from Dr. Krokowski, the aforementioned six daily temperature readings.
The monotonous routine blurs the passage of time. Without the oscillation between work and rest that comes from participating in the world, time starts to assume a boundaryless character. This is mirrored by the unpredictable weather in the Alps. There are not easily defined seasons. Even clear winter days can show intense sunshine; summer days can have snow squalls. With no way to track the seasons, the calendar is primarily marked by holidays. But because the routine is so regimented, only holidays are used to count the passage of time, and even then, it is up to the patients to arrange their celebrations.
One should speak of monotony, an abiding now, of eternalness. Someone brings you your midday soup, the same soup they brought you yesterday and will bring again tomorrow. And in that moment it comes over you — you don't know why or how, but you feel dizzy watching them bring in the soup. The tenses of verbs become confused, they blend and what is now revealed to you as the true tense of all existence is the "inelastic present," the tense in which they bring you soup for all eternity.
The inelastic present is the very essence of lockdown. My coworkers have heard it described as days being split between times to drink coffee and times to drink booze. For patients recovering from TB, the essence of life is waiting. Waiting — for the mail to be delivered, for the seven minutes that the thermometer takes to stabilize, for your beloved to slam the dining hall door, for the result of your COVID test to come back, for the pandemic to pass and restrictions to be relaxed — has peculiar effects on the passage of time:
...waiting means racing ahead, means seeing time and the present not as a gift, but as a barrier, denying and negating their value, vaulting over them in your mind. Waiting, people say, is boring. But in actuality, it can just as easily be diverting, because it devours quantities of time without our ever experiencing or using them for their own sake.
The monotony of life of the Berghof is a boon to Hans, who takes the opportunity to educate himself. He holds frequent philosophical discussions with Settembrini, who represents the Enlightenment: the victory of the mind over nature. Against Settembrini arrives Leo Naphta, a Jesuit Communist whose philosophy is nothing but negation; Settembrini casts himself as the lover of life and the mind, Naphta as the contrarian patron of the spirit and, accordingly, death. Hans himself holds in ironic separation between Settembrini and Naphta, refusing to hold any honest convictions himself, just trying ideas on for size. Early in the novel, before he becomes a proper patient, Hans is pulled by the lure of contrarianism:
He listens to the voice of duty—and what he hears is the license of passion. And out of a sense of duty to be fair and balanced, Hans Castorp listened to Herr Settembrini. With the best of intentions he tested the man's views on reason, the world republic, and beautiful style—and was prepared to be influenced by them. And each time, he found it all the more permissible afterward to let his thoughts and dreams run free in another direction, in the opposite direction.
As an observer to the debates between Naphta and Settembrini, Hans is like us, citizens who have been removed from their ability to act in the world, relying on interlocutors to teach them how they should think about politics. Naphta and Settembrini are two poles; American politics is similarly split along two ideological poles. But ideologies are brittle, as our narrator notes. It is difficult to have coherent principles about politics, because politics is all about balancing the forces of human nature against each other to achieve some measure of stability upon which coordination can be built. I am wholeheartedly on Settembrini's side of the argument, yet even I find some of his monologues cringeworthy. To Settembrini's credit, he was always willing to argue in good faith with Naphta. Our modern day Settembrinis are much worse about giving their ideological opponents an honest hearing, too quick to jump to the label of "misinformation" whenever official channels say so.
But there was no clarity, no order, not even of a dualistic and miitant sort; for it was all not only contradictory, but also topsy-turvy, and the disputants not only contradicted each other, but also themselves. Settembrini had frequently sung the oratorical praises of "criticism," but not it was its opposite—which he called "art"— that he claimed was the more noble principle. And although Naphta had frequently stepped forward as the defender of "natural instinct" against Settembrini's contention that nature was merely a "dumb power," a brutal fact, a stroke of fate, to which reason and human pride dared not submit, he now took up his position on the side of Spirit and of "illness," for there alone were to be found nobility and humanity. Settembrini, meanwhile, had become the advocate of nature and its nobility of health, ignoring any previous notions of emancipation. And matters were no less confusing when it cames to "objective reality" and the "self"—indeed, the confusion here, which was in fact always the same confusion, was so hopeless and literally confused that no one knew any longer who was the devout soul and who the freethinker.
The lack of coherence in Settembrini and Naphta is characteristic of thinkers playing for low stakes, advancing their ideological dogma instead of trying earnestly to try to convince Hans. Their battle was more with each other than it was over Hans's heart and mind. Their duel and Naphta's suicide, in particular, is the thunderbolt that signals that their debates weren't just theoretical: to them, ideas are literally matters of life and death. It is no coincidence that the duel is the last proper event to happen at the Berghof. In the next chapter, the Berghof is "like an anthill in a panic." Ideas have consequences. The alliance system in Europe led to the Great War. Settembrini made a courageous decision to uphold his honor by throwing away his shot. Enraged, Naphta proved he was committed to his philosophy of death and irrationality to the end, shooting himself in the head to show that he was not a coward, giving himself the most coveted position in an argument: the last word.
Before the duel, Hans was seduced by Mynheer Peeperkorn, the lover of his beloved Chauchat, who returns to the Berghof with her after she disappeared for a number of years. Settembrini and Naphta look and sound silly in Peeperkorn's presence, who is a larger-than-life personality. Their conversations simply seem petty, too abstract, compared to the embodied presence of Peeperkorn. Peeperkorn is a true Dionysian, a man of voracious appetites, who believes that "culture is not a matter of reason and well-articulated sobriety, but rather is bound up with enthusiasm, with intoxication, and the sense of regalement." That is the most coherent sentence Peeperkorn is able to utter throughout his brief appearance in the novel. His other sentences are peppered by incomplete thoughts, always trailing off and assuming his interlocutors can read his mind. But he gets away with it through pure charisma. And so Peeperkorn—to return briefly to the political allegory—represents the danger of demagogues and dictators who govern with their person instead of by law. It is simply easier for Hans and the other patients to follow Peeperkorn, who can only vaguely gesture at his own beliefs, than it is for them to evaluate Naphta and Settembrini's arguments. And, of course, though public health agencies have not covered themselves in glory, we have seen the danger that demagogues pose in combating infectious disease.
IV. Respite
The strongest chapters of these novels occur as our protagonists are granted a respite from their battle with disease. In the penultimate chapter of Book 6 of _The Magic Mountain, Snow, Hans breaks the Berghof's code of conduct and teaches himself how to ski to take advantage of his second winter's prodigious snowfall, much to Settembrini's delight. He hatches a plan to store skis at Settembrini's apartment (Settembrini has since moved out of the Berghof) and teach himself on a hill out of sight of the Berghof so no one rats him out. He even brazenly skis right past Director Behrens one day, and is lucky to not be recognized.
The narration reaches its highest pitch during this chapter. As Hans's heart awakens to his beautiful solitude and mastery of nature, the reader does too. After nearly 500 pages of slouching into a very comfortable prison, Hans finally gets to touch something that is an unalloyed good, something that he can experience for himself.
He reveled in the skill he had acquired, which opened up inaccessible worlds and almost obliterated barriers. It permitted him the solitude he sought, the profoundest solitude imaginable, touching his heart with a precarious savagery beyond human understanding.
and
In a word: Hans Castorp had found courage up here—if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them, the mastering of the fear of death out of sympathy with them.
Of course, Hans does not get to escape his confrontation with the elements without a brush with death. On one outing, Hans pushes too far and gets himself lost. He tells himself that if he turned back, he would be back at the Berghof too quickly and he would not have used his afternoon to the fullest. Just after he realizes he is lost, moving in circles, a blizzard comes. He is worn down by the storm and can feel his mental faculties dulling after struggling against the storm. Taking cover near a shed, Hans has a few sips of the port he stashed in his vest pocket, and immediately regrets it as his mind slips away even faster.
Hans descends into a vision of a utopia—birds sweetly singing, a rainbow shining in front of him. A veil of rain falls away to show the Mediterranean, a place Hans has never seen before but feels a pang of recognition for. This utopia is populated by "children of the sun" living in complete harmony with nature and each other. And behind the utopia stands a temple. Within the temple sanctuary, two old women are eating a child alive. He surfaces halfway from his reverie-nightmare, to form an epiphany:
Man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they. More noble than death, too noble for it—that is the freedom of his mind. More noble than life, too noble for it—that is the devotion of his heart. There, I have rhymed it all together, dreamed a poem of humankind. I will remember it. I will be good. I will grant death no dominion over my thoughts. For in that is found goodness and brotherly love, and in that alone. Death is a great power. You take off your hat and tiptoe past his presence, rocking your way forward. He wears the ceremonial ruff of what has been, and you put on austere black in his honor. Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love—there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death—it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. And form too, comes only from love and goodness: form and the cultivated manners of man's fair state, of a reasonable, genial community—out of silent regard for the bloody banquet. Oh, what a clear dream I've dreamed, how well I've 'played king'! I will remember it. I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind.
Hans grasps at enlightenment, perceiving a middle way between his two pedagogues. As he regains consciousness, he is shocked find that he is not frostbitten. He did not sleep the whole night in front of the shed. In fact, only twelve or thirteen minutes had passed since he had his sip of port. He returns to the Berghof in time for supper. And the chapter ends:
His dream was already beginning to fade. And by bedtime he was no longer exactly sure what his thoughts had been.
To my recollection, Hans does not recall his snowbound dream and his epiphany for the rest of the novel. With nothing to fall back on—no philosophical discussions with Settembrini or Naphta about what their interpretation of the dream was, no spiritual tradition to help him place his experience in context, no commiseration with Joachim or anyone else he could call a friend—Hans loses grasp of it entirely. We do not hear about Hans discussing it with Krokowski in analysis, even. How sad is it, to have such a glimpse of transcendence, but to be denied everlasting access to it! Hans, simply, could not do it on his own. Having experienced such spiritual awakening, a glimpse of the divine, it is impossible to keep it at the front of one's mind. The minute you allow yourself to focus on mundane tasks, to pay attention to what's in front of you, the realization of the miracle of life dissolves—unless it can be found in the object of your attention.
Had the novel ended there, the meaning of it all would be much less ambiguous. But Mann needed to complete Book 6 with the tragic death of Joachim, and to show us that Hans will take his place on the plains as cannon fodder.
The Plague has its own version of Hans's snowbound adventure. Dr. Rieux and Tarrou decide to take an evening off in the name of friendship. Tarrou tells Rieux a story from his upbringing. His father was a prosecutor. When Tarrou was seventeen, his father invited him to see him speak at court. The criminal who was sentenced to death that day was unremarkable—but up until the point that he saw him with his own eyes, Tarrou thought of him as "the defendant," not a person. Tarrou's father appeared in his red prosecutor robes, in command, sentencing a man to death with whatever clever arguments would get him the outcome he desired, no different from a murderer. Tarrou rebelled, becoming a drifter, working odd jobs. He ended up becoming an activist, presumably a Communist fighting against the fascist takeover of Europe. But the Communists, too, imposed the death penalty or its enemies. And eventually he had to break from them. He says:
And thus I came to understand that I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I'd believed with all my soul that I was fighting it. I learned that I had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people; that I'd even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only end that way... I replied that the most eminent of the plague-stricken, the men who wear red robes, also have excellent arguments to justify what they do, and once I admitted the arguments of necessity and force majeure put forward by the less eminent, I couldn't reject those of the eminent... For many years I've been ashamed, mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn... I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak—and to act—quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track... I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer.
With his philosophy—which is actually Camus's, in light of his experiences with the French Communist Party—Tarrou lays out that his guilt is fundamental to his being. He is working to save so many lives in Oran precisely because he felt tainted by the blood of lives sacrificed at the altar of his past ideology, something he regards as a disease no different from the plague. After Tarrou's speech, he turns to Dr. Rieux and tells him that they should go for a swim, "for friendship's sake," a respite for two tired warriors. I found it tremendously moving to think of these two men, who had given everything to their fellow townspeople, taking a sliver of time to enjoy each other's company, to delight in the pleasure of exercising a healthy body. It is no accident that the swimming episode and Hans's skiing expedition are linked: exercise is rebellion against disease and the ravages of time. We are corporeal creatures. We need to touch, to see and be seen, and to move.
To Camus, the plague is the ultimate example of man's absurd condition because victory is never final. We can only cheat death for so long. The closing pages of The Plague end with Dr. Rieux meditating on how the plague could "lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests". Similarly, for poor Hans, the outcome of war is never final. The conflict that descends upon Europe with the end of The Magic Mountain was once called "The War to End War." Victory of any kind is never final; it is just a temporary advantage.
My hope is that, confronted with our mortality, we become more honest about what we need to live a good life: the feeling of sunlight on our skin, making eye contact, sharing laughter and touch, building physical things. Hobbies boomed during lockdown as time wasted on commuting could be converted into little expressions of personal freedom. We need to keep going, and keep sharing. I am writing this blog to build something for the future. We should all try to build something for ourselves, anything at all that we can look back on in the future that says "I Was Here," instead of losing our lives to the churn of consumer goods.
COVID-19 is still spreading unchecked in most of the world. There may yet be variants that are able to infect those who have been vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines. COVID-19 may become endemic, but it may also become as much of an inconvenience as the common cold or the flu with time. It is hard to say. It is also hard to say how the world will cope with some fraction of their population being disabled due to long-term effects of their COVID infection. And next time, the disease may be closer to the plague than COVID-19. It seems like we got lucky with SARS and MERS and Ebola.
For the space between the near future, where COVID-19 has been contained by vaccination, and that far future, sum-of-all-fears pandemic, we should descend from our sanatoriums and re-engage, to summon the spirit of love from the wreckage of mass death. It is all that we have been given.