APRIL 17, 2020 – Yesterday evening my book club gathered via Zoom. Up for discussion was The Plague by French existentialist author, Albert Camus, winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature. It had been selected by the physician of our group, the inimitable Ravi Balasubrahmanyan. (Decades ago, I learned to spell his name by this mnemonic: “He’s a Brahman, with a bowl of soup up front and the last of Paul Bunyan at the end. To double-check, ‘u’ count the ‘A’s”—all five.”)
If you haven’t read The Plague, you should. If you haven’t contracted the (bubonic) plague, you shouldn’t. Untreated, it has an 80% kill rate.
Of course, the book is far more than a fictional chronicle of the bubonic plague in the Algerian, Mediterranean city of Onan. It’s about humankind’s alienation from itself. Camus had fought in the French Resistance during World War II, and as Ravi observed, if you were alive going into that conflagration, you came out of it either dead or disillusioned.
Naturally, we wound up talking about the plague of our day, Corvid-19, but reached no conclusions except that we could reach no conclusions.
What we discussed at length was the role of the plague and other disease in the course of human history, most notably Europe during the Black Death (1347-51). Not a pretty sight. Forget “battlefield triage.” Across much of the continent there was no “triage” whatsoever, just a “battlefield,” where the Grim Reaper reaped supreme. By the time end of the Black Death, as much as half or more of the population of Europe had perished. It would take another 200 years for population levels to recover.
The devastation had multifarious consequences for later civilization. For example, researchers in 2006 examining cereal pollen levels in Europe discovered a deep dive beginning in 1347 and henceforth for years, a corresponding decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide, as agriculture was vastly curtailed and natural reforestation expanded. For the next couple of centuries, the planet cooled–all because, the theory goes, tiny fleas on big rats from China carried the microscopic bacterium, Yersinia pestis. What you don’t know can’t make you anxious, but what you can’t see (and don’t control in time) can wipe out millions.
Learning from this uplifting conversation, we avoided altogether, any talk of politics. Since we were members of the same choir in that respect, little need existed for collective masochism. Instead, we science- and history-minded members listened to our club’s resident polymath present his “either-or” choices for next month’s read: 1. Pimp: The Story of My Life by “Iceberg Slim,” a/k/a Robert Beck, f/k/a Robert Maupin, sometime insecticide salesman, Hip-Hop influencer, prolific writer, and . . . yes, pimp; OR 2. Ottomania by writer, historian Roderick Cavaliero. Mr. Polymath (a/k/a Steve Benson) warned that while Pimp provided some fascinating insights into American ghetto culture of an earlier era, the book was, well, rather “raw.” That sold us without the need for any further discussion. Motion seconded and passed by acclamation.
We’d survived The Plague; we could survive “raw.”
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
