TELL magazine: December 2020 - Emanuel Synagogue

“Show me a plague, and
I’ll show you the world!” 3
What did Larry Kramer mean?
That a plague, (a pandemic), reveals
something true about our world that
would otherwise remain opaque? If
so, what could that be? And what
is COVID-19 revealing about our
world? Is it the astonishing ease with
which this virus has brought the
world to its knees? Or the way it has
utterly reshaped our social interactions?
Or the speed with which it has
exposed the shakiness of our institutions?
Or how the mutual mistrust
between nations has been laid bare?
In Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay “On
Being Ill”, she wrote about the startling
dearth of writing devoted to
disease in the wake of the Spanish
influenza pandemic, a global
catastrophe which killed tens of millions
of people in 1918 and 1919.
She argued passionately for the
importance of writing about illness,
both acknowledging the difficulty of
this and calling for a new language
to describe disease directly. Woolf
also wrote about the divide between
the healthy and the sick, and in
doing so she unintentionally conjured
a very contemporary image:
“We float with the dead leaves on the
lawn, irresponsible and disinterested
and able, perhaps for the first time
for years, to look around, to look up
– to look, for example, at the sky.” 4
For millions of us, this may be the
single, defining, collective experience
of COVID-19 - the lockdown,
the shelter in place, the shielding,
call it by any euphemism you wish.
In one way or another, we have all
experienced it, or are still experiencing
it, somewhere on earth
today. The frustration, the flatness,
the loneliness, the fear for our livelihoods,
maybe even the terror of
being shut in; but also, the bliss
of being given permission to just
stop, look up and stare at the sky.
1. “Illness as Metaphor” by
Susan Sontag, 1978, Farrar,
Strauss & Giroux, NY
2. Ibid.
3. The Larry Kramer quote is from
“The American People: Volume 1:
Search for My Heart: A Novel”,
2015, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,
NY. I came across the quote in a
NY Times article by Dwight Garner
from April 11, 2020: https://www.
nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opinion/
sunday/covid-quotes-literature.html
4. Virginia Woolf, “On Being
Ill”, 1926, published by T.S.
Eliot’s journal “The Criterion”
P.S. TB lives on: https://www.abc.
net.au/news/2020-06-26/tuberculosis-outbreak-at-st-vincents-hospital-in-sydney/12398918
To read more of Nicole’s writing
please visit nicolewaldner.com
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