I’ve been looking for perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic, and often, but not always, I’m seeing the parallels. Four months into the crisis I’m writing this, and it will be read months later in a world that will most likely be different from the present one—or perhaps, if we are unfortunate, much the same.Geraldine Brooks’ novel Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague is based on events in an actual English village during a 17th century epidemic. How remarkable that a novel published in 2001 should have so closely anticipated many current conditions, especially the self-quarantining villagers foreshadowing today’s socially distanced societies. The villagers, at the behest of their minister, have isolated themselves from the world to avoid spreading death and must deal with the disease and with the effects of isolation, economic disparity, profiteering, and conspiracy theories. Brooks takes her audience across several peaks and valleys as the town finds its most severe challenges in natural human responses that prove tragic under unnatural circumstances.
World War I has passed beyond firsthand memory, but it has left two markers, besides its monuments to battles and casualties. They are captured in Wilfred Owen’s poem: “My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” Writers in prose and poetry still write of the pity that began in the trauma of trench warfare and the psychic damage first seen by some as more than cowardice or weak character. In Regeneration, Pat Barker blends truth and art, taking us into Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Dr. W.H.R. Rivers treats soldiers with shell shock, including Owen himself, through talk therapy and memory work.
Among Rivers’ and Barker’s other real patients is Siegfried Sassoon, soldier and outspoken critic of the war’s management. In later scenes a who’s who of writers also arrive. One evening, “Sassoon was trying to decipher a letter from H.G. Wells when Owen knocked” to ask Sassoon’s advice on “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” as confirmed in Owen’s posthumous Poems. On another the writer Robert Graves says he didn’t mind Sassoon being late for a drink because “Owen was keeping me amused.”
More important than the pleasure of recognition is Barker’s deep examination of the various emotional states and physical manifestations that appear among the patients, and her reflections on war and the pity of war, which could be written about living victims of PTSD, whether from Afghanistan, Iraq, or our besieged cities and countries today.
Flu Files
As most older adults and history students know, the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 came just as the world was celebrating war’s end. Gina Kolata’s 1999 Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It begins there but goes beyond. She tells the story from 1918 through later scares and flares, asking two questions: Why did the 1918 virus dwarf all others in deadliness, and can we learn anything about that strain that “could help scientists save humanity if that terrible virus or another one like it stalks the earth again”? Kolata spends less than a third of her book on the pandemic, then examines the efforts to isolate a virus that vanished a decade before we found a means of seeing it. On the way, we learn of several similarities to COVID-19 and one large difference. Both ravaged certain groups of people, ran rampant in prisons, and produced national scapegoats (the 1918–19 illness “came to be called the Spanish flu, to Spain’s consternation”). But the influenza outbreak had three clusters of victims: the elderly, the very young, and healthy individuals in their 20s and 30s.Kolata follows the scientists who have attacked the mystery with ever more powerful weapons, finally locating some remaining virus samples but not yet the answer they seek: “It is the ultimate frustration. Scientists have captured the mass murderer, the 1918 flu virus. But they still do not know its murder weapon.” This is the rare science chronicle that does not end with a vaccine, a cure, or a Nobel Prize, and it’s all the more instructive for that reason.
An Unrelenting Storm
Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl was a painful read. Brooks and Kolata write about so-called “acts of God,” and Barker balances tragedy and partial triumph in a story of regeneration. But Egan’s work is an unrelenting arena of human avarice, folly, and cruelty, briefly illuminated by stories of decent people who sought a paradise but instead built a hell for themselves and their descendants.Unrelenting also describes the storms themselves. I imagine most of us think of ruined farmland, drought, whipping dirt, and farmers loading their belongings on a truck and heading west. In fact, the “dust” was unimaginably swift, dense, heavy (a single storm one afternoon “carried twice as much dirt as was dug … to create the Panama Canal”), and deadly, killing people and animals by “dust pneumonia,” suffocation, living burial, and strangest of all, static electricity. No wonder meteorologists called it the No. 1 weather event of its century.
Almost every headline about today’s pandemic can be found in Egan’s chronicle: respiratory illness, repeated claims that the worst was over, blame, spurious miracle solutions, overcrowded hospitals. One sentence collapses nine decades into an instant, “The Red Cross advised people not to go outside unless they had to and then only with their respiratory masks.”
People, moved by hubris, greed, or ignorance, were responsible for a tragedy larger than any imagined by the Greek dramatists. By driving out native peoples who had learned over centuries to live on and with the land, then nearly exterminating the bison, uprooting the grasses that held the earth together, over-farming, and relying on such false notions as “rain follows the plough,” they unleashed what historians term our worst prolonged environmental disaster.
Unlike the prior plagues, this event bears closest resemblance to our environmental crisis. If, as some of the first environmentalists realized too late, “It would take a thousand years to rebuild an inch of topsoil” in that region, how long could it take to restore the water, air, and land being despoiled across the planet?
Coming Together
Is there any positive news? Some comes from Sebastian Junger in his most recent book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, a work that follows in a line of analyses, from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning to Chris Hedges’ War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Junger blends his own experiences of modern war with anthropological and sociological research and evolutionary biology to support the thesis that “humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It’s time for that to end.”Beyond combat, Junger describes the bonds that develop among civilians enduring sieges, bombings, or earthquakes and observes that, “Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.”
Does this bode well for the United States, after a year of both pandemic and social unrest? Five years ago, Junger wrote, “we live in a society that is basically at war with itself” and that “people speak with … a level of contempt usually reserved for enemies in wartime, except now it’s applied to our fellow citizens.” The COVID-19 crisis has increased the sense of isolation that already plagued our world. But that is why we are seeking connection by whatever means possible, and so many are giving time, money, and even their lives to help others at risk. It is also why the chance to march for a cause often seems worth personal risk of injury or illness. Junger presents us with a choice: “A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly … isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity.” Which will we be?
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