The Abstract Can Be So Very Personal
We’ve passed a sad milestone is U.S. coronavirus history:
Imagine if, starting now, we held a moment of silence for every American who has died from COVID-19. We wouldn't speak for the rest of the day. For the rest of the week. For the rest of the month. If each one of those deaths was honored with the full traditional 60 seconds of silence, this country would stand in hushed, somber, unrelenting remembrance for just short of 70 days.
This piece, written before we reached this unfortunate mark of 100,000 coronavirus deaths, helped me prepare for it soberly. Here’s how The New York Times memorialized it, and the reader reaction to it.
How is it that an abstract number and a list of names that mean nothing to me personally—feels both meaningful and personal.
A Strange Time to Be Old
Forgive the extended quote, but it set up this piece beautifully in my view:
Each day’s headlines jolt us with the same unnerving reality: There has never, in the history of the Republic, been a stranger time to be old. We live in a kind of gerontocracy that feels both accidental and deeply entrenched. Our best hope for unseating the about-to-turn-74-year-old in the White House, whose reign is propped up by a terrifyingly powerful cable network that serves as the plaything of an ultrarich 89-year-old, is a former vice-president who, at 77, won the Democratic nomination over a 78-year-old senator whom young people preferred during the primaries. If elected, he will, one hopes, work effectively with the 80-year-old Speaker of the House or may, one worries, be thwarted by the truculent 78-year-old Senate majority leader. Until then, several crucial rights, including access to health care and abortion, may rest in the survival of an 87-year-old Supreme Court justice currently in somewhat fragile health (notwithstanding the fact that her endurance and physical strength have become the stuff of legend and of memes).
The futures of all Americans are largely in the hands of people who are entering, or well into, what one of my uncles used to call “the bonus round.” And yet the aged, at the height of their power and disinclined to relax their grip on it — just look at who votes — have also never been more vulnerable. What a horrific few months it has been — especially in New York, and especially for the poor and the nonwhite. But this virus strikes the old with the most consistent lethality. Almost 60 percent of those who have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. were 75 or older. Almost 80 percent were age 65 or older. (Only 7 percent of deaths have been under 54.) Residents of nursing homes or assisted-living facilities have made up as many as half the fatalities in some areas of the country, and the reaction among many people, either by implication or outright declaration, has been, “See? That means most of us have nothing to worry about!”
Hedgehogs Like Us
A rumination on the coronavirus, early church ascetics, and an obscure verse (“The mountains are for stags; the rocks are a refuge for hedgehogs”--Psalm 104:18) begins like this:
In the desert wilds of Egypt in the 4th Century, hermits gathered in the shelter of rocks to try to find Jesus. The spiritual elite of their time, they are also a source of guidance for ours. John Cassian chronicled the wisdom and sayings of these strange people, half-starving and half-enlightened under the burning Egyptian sun. He went out into the desert to listen to their stories and to share them with the broader world. There is something to be learned from the hermits in camel hair shirts, eating almost nothing, and praying constantly. What Cassian learned from these spiritual elites is that they weren’t really elites. They were spiritual hedgehogs, like the rest of us.
License to Draw a Killer
Another article that hooked me with its opening (Can you tell I’m a sucker for good first paragraphs?) begins like this:
In media parlance it’s become our “invisible enemy”: a nightmarish, oneiric force that can’t be seen, heard, or touched. But with the use of modeling software, scientists and illustrators have begun to visualize coronavirus, turning it into something that can be seen, understood, and, hopefully, eventually vanquished by science. Many of us imagine the virus as a sphere radiating red spikes—but why? Certain elements of these visualizations are based on the way coronavirus appears under a microscope, and others are choices that were made, an exercise of artistic license.
Even if you don’t read the text, take a look how artists have pictured public enemy number one the last few months.
Those Wild Swiss Cartographers
While we’re on the subject of artistic license, look at these Swiss maps. Apparently the supposedly buttoned-down cartographers of that land-locked land wanted to bust out of the stereotype—yet subtly, secretly.
Grace and peace,
Mark Galli
markgalli.com
P.S. My apologies for the late delivery. Here’s the thing about retirement: without a work routine, one day bleeds into the next and, except for Sunday, every day feels the same. I woke up this morning feeling like it was Thursday. Apparently it isn’t. Thanks for your patience.