/lit/ - Literature

I've heard it said that the pandemic has brought the best out of people, that many have pulled together to support one another during a time of volatility and shattered norms. I have found quite the opposite to be true. As is so often the case, history shows our hand before it gets played. In his account of the black plague in The Decameron, 14th century writer Giovanni Boccaccio recounts how the windows would shutter and the streets empty out, how the elderly would be left to die, how parents would abandon their children, all out of the throbbing, urgent, overriding necessity for self-preservation. Epidemic does not "bring people together" metaphorically speaking in the sense of awakening some profound spirit of human solidarity. Rather, plague ushers in a retreat inward. Pandemics impose a corrupt logic of paranoia and social simplification : cut out everyone who is not necessary. One notices how extra hard it has been to meet anyone new this year, not only for the obvious fact that the familiar haunts for socializing have gone dark, but because so many have this extra protective film shielding them from everything outside the mind-numbingly familiar. The psychological cost of the pandemic, on children's development, on deferred dreams, on on scuttled career prospects, the budding friendships cut short, the fertile open possibilities bottlenecked the narrow repetitiveness , will not be totaled for years to come.

When the chips are down it is the smallness in humanity which sticks out, the fearful animal side which is most prominent. This isn't an uplifting or optimistic message, but a true one.