This New Old War

"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 by surprise."

Albert Camus, "The Plague"


In August of that year a new civil war, one of the many that had been devastating the country for over half a century, threatened to spread, and the government imposed martial law and a six o'clock curfew in the provinces along the Caribbean coast. Although some disturbances had already occurred, and the troops had committed all kinds of retaliatory abuses, Florentino Ariza was so befuddled that he was unaware of the state of the world, and a military patrol surprised him one dawn as he disturbed the chastity of the dead with his amorous provocations. By some miracle he escaped summary execution after he was accused of being a spy who sent messages in the key of G to the Liberal ships marauding in nearby waters. 

 Gabriel García Márquez, "Love in the Time of Cholera"

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Dear Kate,

What are we going to do with ourselves when it's all over?  With our new dogmas and rituals, new knowledge and understanding about the world and ourselves, our new-found freedom that will forever cast the shadow that's our new-found fear?

"Keep your distance."  Same words, in same arrangement, spoken the same way, but they meant something different last Christmas.

Today's video, up there, my Easter gift for you, Rowan Williams speaking about plagues, shaking our world without making a sound.  I wonder if that's how Jesus spoke.  (Turn on the closed captioning, it's mostly accurate and really helpful, as Rowan spoke in long, beautiful sentences that wouldn't lose you if you are also fully present in the conversation.)

He talked about two novels, the two I quoted above, how they use "the metaphor of pestilence and epidemic to explore moral categories in ways reflected unexpectedly themes that go back as far as Oedipus. Both attempt to use plague as a metaphor for human constraint for deficits in public or private meaning created in a disenchanted and secularizing world."

The new language we are learning lately isn't anything new at all, so aren't our new dogmas and rituals, new knowledge and understanding about the world and ourselves, our new-found freedom that will forever cast the shadow that's our new-found fear.

The sky above us will always be blue, never unprecedented.

Yours, Alex