Something Wonderful: How Marcus Aurelius Responded To A Pandemic
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
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
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
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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!