by Adam Gopnik
Plagues happen only to people. Animals can suffer from mass infections, of course, but they experience them as one more bad blow from an unpredictable and predatory natural environment.
Only people put mental brackets around a phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic and attempt to give it a name and some historical perspective, some sense of precedence and possibility.
The coronavirus, indifferent to individuals, has no creed or moral purpose, but it becomes human when it hits us—neither microscopic nor historic, just the size we are as we experience its effects. As Albert Camus wrote in “The Plague,” the 1947 novel that’s becoming to this disruption what W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” was to the aftermath of 9/11, the microbe has no meaning; we seek to create one in the chaos it brings … leggi tutto
