Irrational

As we navigate the pandemic, everything is new. We don't know what's under each rock. We don't know the path ahead. This, I believe, is why we are panic-stricken.

But as we get along, and the patterns become more obvious, we find the storyline predictable.

I guess that's the reason I borrowed Geraldine Brooks’s novel Year of Wonders. A story of the plague year, 1666, when we heard about how breathing would cease. More times than not, the patient's throat would give a wet gurgle, straining for air, and chest would rise and fall in a series of swift, shallow pants. After a moment or two, these would slow and diminish, until breathing stopped.

I read about the villagers' decision to quarantine themselves within Eyam, a village in the rugged mountain spine of England. And how the rector exhausted to dig graves. Day and night. How nobody was troubling with coffins, and how families simply carried their loved ones to their graves, or if they were not strong enough, dragged them with a blanket slung beneath the armpits of the corpse. And their great difficulty in poring through the book to find the repertoire of herbs: nettle for the blood, starwort and violet leaves for the lungs, silverweed to cool a fever, cress for the stomach. I felt every bit as similar as what was happening now and then, more than 300 years ago. Think of the way panic leads to a wealth of irrational remedies, from frantic attempts to resist contagion of plague, all the way to absurd judgment of who is right and who is wrong. Imagine the way to tell whether someone is a witch: throw her into water, and if she floats, she's a witch. If she sinks, she isn't.

All manners of falsehood. That was utterly nonsense. Okay, thank God, that was 1666. But I'm not sure we are anything better today.