“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
To counter the loneliness and uncertainty brought by the Virus, to resist its ruinous effects on one’s aptitude for clear thought, to cancel out the effect of its noxious mythologies, to defy the poison of the monsters it fosters, to offset our fears …. To offset our fears, perhaps we should give thanks. I am not sick but closer to the end and a prime candidate for the Virus, and […]
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In eighth grade I met Sister Francis Marion, six feet tall, wrapped in the blue cloth of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), whose look of displeasure could make ice melt. She might have spoken Jack Aubrey’s words to us on the first day and it would have made perfect sense. Raised to believe in our innate sinfulness, his words said in Sister’s voice would have set the tone for […]
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I am not supposed to write this, I think. I am supposed to write only that this will pass and on the other side, we will all be fine, and the little worlds we lived in will go on as they had, the little worlds of not overthinking each entrance into a store, each touch of a handle outside my home, each meeting with someone other than my wife. I […]
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I’m going to write about reading during the time of the Virus but the Virus itself makes it feel as if reading is superfluous, as if we should be gathering at hospitals in groups and emptying bedpans, cooking meals in mass kitchens for the workers, sitting with the sick who have no family, not conducting our abnormal normal lives with a book in hand, occasionally slinking off to a deserted […]
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