Feb 2021 by Elleen Xue
“Life without art is torture.” – Caravaggio
As the once in a century Coronavirus pandemic set it, I was essentially shut in. How would I pass the time? And luckily for me, I had some literature to help me get through it.
The first book I turned to was a small, pocket book green hardcover of Albert Camus’s The Plague. Camus set the plight in Algeria around the turn of the 20th century and presaged many phenomenon I saw here. Beyond the emotions of panic and despair there were mafias taking advantage of black markets, brokers price gouging medical supplies, and people who used their wealth and influence to try and obviate the closing of all travel into and out of the town.
Camus – whose other best known work of literature is “The Stranger” - eloquently captures the sentiment of a paranoid suspicion of the other. I won’t ruin the book for you, so no spoiler alerts, but it kept me company during the February of the Crown Pest.
Now, if I may, as a poet and literature person I would like to explain why I refer to the Virus as the “Crown Pest.”
The word “Corona” is Latin for crown, as in king, and unfortunately what most Americans think of when they read or hear the word “Corona” is the Mexican beer. In fact, Corona beer even stooped production. So in many ways it was a misnomer (the virus did not originate in Mexico, and few Americans are fluent in Latin.” Secondly, “pest” is short for “pestilence” or plague, which is what the virus is and was. It created such havoc in all our lives that to use the term “pest” seemed a literary understatement.
Thus I used a literary reference – The Crown Pest – to denote the severity and disruption the illness bequeathed, without pointing fingers.
Then, aside from reading The Plague by Camus, I chose the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mask of the Red Death” where in the end, all the tortured souls extinguishes by the plague of the time cried out in unity, but all had very different accents and vocabulary. My buddy Chris and I debated this moment in the story.
To him, diseases and plagues tend to promote misinformation, so the cacophony of voices was a symbol of panic. But to me, the cacophony was emblematic that plagues do not pick and choose victims. Even the nineteenth century when Poe wrote, that one spirit should cry out in an Irish brogue and one an Italian singsong meant to emphasize one thing – Europe at that time, and still as is now, like the USA, immune to viruses that know no borders. No virus will stop at the border crossing – they permeate.
Finally, the last book revisited for a tenth time now was “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman and explains exactly what the title says: earth once humans are gone for good. What will live? What will perish? Will any intelligent life even see signs we Homo sapiens once paraded the planet and even traversed the solar system?
Now, I suppose one may think in macabre or escapist to indulge in pandemic literature and wallow in Camus and Poe and then a wise man, but by availing myself of these authors, their visions and their minds, I was able to at least salvage a vestige of mine.
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