Something Wonderful: How Marcus Aurelius Responded To A Pandemic
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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As a goose is not alarmed by gaggling, nor a sheep by bleating, so neither be you terrified by the clamor of the senseless multitude.
Epictetus
Everything is undermined by dwaddling government.
It’s kind of silly to say we’ll get through this. Of course we will except for all of those who don’t. Oh, for get them, they were old and had underlying health problems and were going to die anyway. This just doesn’t sound reassuring to me. At this exact moment over 28,000 people in the U.S. have died from this. They didn’t get through this! This virus has just begun. The death toll doubles every 5-7 days. It hasn’t even taken hold yet in most American cities. It will. Each city and each state will go through what NY City is going through. Wishful thinking is not the cure for this.
Yes, we’ve seen this movie before: some historians of medicine note that the Antonine Plague appears to be a European extension of a pandemic that started in– guess where?– China around 155 AD. The disease, which may have been either smallpox or measles, spread westward along the Silk Road toward the Near East, where Roman soldiers stationed in that outpost of empire brought the plague with them when they returned to Rome. Other legionaries carried the disease northward as far as the Rhine and westward into what is now France.
Can’t resist adding an old joke, courtesy of my high school Latin teacher: Q: How did Marcus Aurelius get to Rome? A: The Stoic brought him.
“Right now many people all over the world are understandably terrified of corona virus.” He lost me right there. Most people have an excellent chance of survival. If karma strikes me down for my bad attitude, perhaps it is my time to go.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-19/coronavirus-odds-of-survival
It has an eight week cycle. Infections peak on the sixth week, then start to drop off. doesn’t matter if you use social distancing or not. New York is listing a lot of deaths as virus related, when they aren’t even testing for the virus. And most of the country has little in common with the New York City lifestyle. Even hospitals in the Seattle area are empty now.
You learn stuff in the Army you can use your whole life, and one of the things I learned real good in Viet Nam is, people who keep their head down can’t see what they’re doing and get shot. Of course, people who stick their heads up to see what they’re doing get shot, too.
Thus endeth today’s lesson.
The point, and I do have one for a change, is when it’s your time to go, you’re gone, and no amount of whining, hiding or running is gonna help. You might as well go out like a man (or a real woman!) and not a mouse, hiding in the darkness amongst empty Spam cans and the little cardboard ta-doot-de-doo tubes left over when the toilet paper runs out. It’s time for the United States to come out of the bunker and get back to work.
Lighten up, Francis…
I ‘m in the demographic sweet spot for this Batflu and refuse to let it rule my life. So I get up in the morning (every morning) and do what I do: morning prayers, coffee and greet the day. What else ya got?
Really, that’s the best you can do?
No, each state will NOT go thru what NYC and its suburb cities went thru because only NYC has the ultimate Covid super-vector — the subway. Add to that, the fact that everyone there eats out at least once a day and lives in a postage stamp sized living space
And to top it off, their woke leaders decided it would be cute to give native son Trump the bird by deciding that Covid wasnt “really” that bad like stupid xenophobe Drumpf said. So no need to avoid the subway or mass gatherings for the latest victim du jour of the h8ters – The Chinese
It can be hard to see. We want to believe it will be over soon. We want to believe that NY City did stupid things and that is why their death rate is huge. They are simply the tip of the spear in this war. Viruses tend to spread until they cannot spread anymore. That is the magic 70% number you often hear about. The Covid-19 virus kills from 4%-0.8% (depending on which stats you look at). This isn’t going to change simply because you live in a small town and don’t take the subway. Eventually, a month, maybe two the virus will go through the population in your state and in your town. When it does somewhere between 4% – 0.8% of that population will die. That’s just the way it is.
OneGuy:
There is a hidden assumption behind what you say. The figures you quote assume that everyone gets the level of medical treatment – up to and including intensive care with ventilation – they need to recover.
The problem with that assumption is that if the pandemic was allowed to really let rip, most people wouldn’t get adequate treatment; indeed, many wouldn’t get any at all. Nobody knows what the mortality rate for untreated or inadequately treated covid-19 is, and I hope we never find out.
That is true. That seems to be what happened in Italy. That fear is why the quarantine/shutdown was necessary to allow our hospitals to get the supplies they needed and to be better prepared.
Our historian friend appears to be decimal point challenged. The common wisdom about the Antonine Plague is that it killed 25% of the subjects in the Empire
This would be in line with 10-19 million total deaths. If the lethality was a mere 2.5 to 3 percent, that would yield a total population of 330 to 750 million for the Empire, which seems a TAD high
My sources say this pestilence arrived in the Empire after Rome finally subdued the pesky, militaristic Parthian kingdom. Legionnaires picked up the disease after sacking the Parthian capitol. Some irony — Rome’s great triumph sows a seed that led to its decline and eventual fall
Checked again this morning and yep, by golly, the sky’s still up there.
The Big Fear is out today.
Cower in Place!