Life update: I have COVID-19.
I found out last Thursday, after I started getting the typical symptoms: headache, sore throat. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been a breakthrough infection, so I got tested at the university, and it came back positive.
After two phases of lockdown in Denmark over the course of a year, and after having been vaccinated, I had all but banished the possibility of another lockdown or quarantine from my mind. Such did not prove to be the case. Over the past couple days, I’ve been attending classes and working from here while still waiting to see the outside world. I suppose it borders on cliché to comment on how miraculous that is–twenty years ago, I’d be doing nothing but watching VHS tapes on a low-definition TV.
To celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d share a bit from an 1353 work of Italian literature, The Decameron, which is about ten young adults who run away from the city during the Black Death and tell stories to one another to pass the time. Plague seems to be the topic of the zeitgeist, and there’s something fascinating about reading contemporary attitudes about one of history’s deadliest plagues and seeing people newly discover things we take for granted with modern germ theory.
“This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry or oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even further: not only did talking to or being around the sick bring infection and a common death, but also touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them seemed to communicate this very disease to the person involved.
“What I am about to say is incredible to hear, and if I and others had not witnessed it with our own eyes, I should not dare believe it (let alone write about it), no matter how trustworthy a person I might have heard it from. Let me say, then, that the plague described here was of such virulence in spreading from one person to another that not only did it pass from one man to the next, but, what’s more, it was often transmitted from the garments of a sick or dead man to animals that not only became contaminated by the disease but also died within a brief period of time. My own eyes, as I said earlier, were witness to such a thing one day: when the rags of a poor man who died of this disease were thrown into the public street, two pigs came upon them, and…took the rags and shook them around; and within a short time, after a number of convulsions, both pigs fell dead upon the ill-fated rugs, as if they had been poisoned.”
Even more fascinating are the diverse and extreme reactions to the plague. “…almost all of [those who remained alive] took a very cruel attitude in the matter; that is, they completely avoided the sick and their possessions, and in so doing, each one believed that he was protecting his own good health.” Others “thought that living moderately and avoiding any excess might help a great deal in resisting this disease, and so they gathered in small groups and lived entirely apart from everyone else…eating the most delicate of foods and drinking the finest of wines (doing so always in moderation), allowing no one to speak about or listen to anything said about the sick and the dead outside.” Still others “believed that drinking excessively, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating, satisfying in every way the appetites as best one could, laughing, and making light of everything that had happened was the best medicine for such a disease…This they were able to do easily, for everyone felt he was doomed to die and, as a result, abandoned his property, so that most of the houses had become common property, and any stranger who came upon them used them as if he were their rightful owner.” In any case “the revered authority of the laws, both divine and human, had fallen and almost completely disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and executors of the laws were either dead or sick or so short of help that it was impossible for them to fulfill their duties; as a result, everybody was free to do as he pleased.”
Makes me a little more grateful that, despite everything that’s happened this year, from infections to rejections to armed insurrections, at least civilization as we know it hasn’t collapsed. ∎
Cover photo: A display at the BYU Museum of Art, which I visited not long before falling ill.