N.B.: For those who prefer a podcast format, that’s now available. It's four minutes and change long. I hope it finds some resonance!
It’s New Year’s Day, 2021, and the world is sighing in collective relief that one nightmare cycle around the sun has concluded.
I’m alive, I’m one week into official senior citizenry, and I’ve decided to speak from my own stance of good luck about things big and small that move me. I hope I can offer some succor or something refreshing to someone thereby, and not just humor my own vanity. (I haven’t got more to lose than your attention if I fail.)
Perspective is important. COVID-19 is in every newspaper and on everybody’s mind. I probably won’t teach you anything new about that. But what you may not have known is that Ancient Rome, on the cusp of its long decline and ultimate collapse with its sacking by the Vandals in 476 CE, succumbed to a daunting pandemic known as the Plague of Galen, or Antonine Plague, over a 15-year period from 165 to 180 CE.
The plague is believed to have been either the measles or smallpox. It was brought into the Roman homelands by returning legions from the Near East. It erupted once more in 189 CE. At its height, the pandemic was killing two thousand persons a day in the Roman capital. It felled about a quarter of all those infected. It probably killed the emperor, Lucius Verus, in 169 CE. All in all, the pandemic killed about five million people, laid waste to up to a third of some populations, and devastated the Roman army.
Perspective also says to me that our private and shared anxiety did not suddenly end with an arbitrary, if atomically measured, strike of the clock past what we call a certain midnight. As an unidentified hospice patient once said within earshot of conductor George Alexander Albrecht, “Civilization has clocks; nature has time.” Nature is the stronger of the two in the long run.
“Civilization has clocks; nature has time.”
We must pick up the pieces of our own shattered existence and dreams one straw or brick at a time. Plodding forth, with the occasional nod to inspiration, strength, scientific doggedness, and – not least – respect and love for our fellow humans, will not ensure our survival, either as a society or as individuals. But it’s the best way and the chosen way for us to proceed. And so, we will.
Meanwhile, count your blessings, keep your head, don’t throw away safety, health, or life for silly reasons, and stay patient. This isn’t the moment of humanity’s final end. Don’t hasten your own end, either. Don’t be heedless. Do embrace – with a mask – the timeless ideas and ethos that make us human and show us at our best.⬕