Pandemic comfort reading
Someone dumped an old beautiful book containing the collected works of Daniel Defoe on the curb in front of our apartment building.
Flipping through his A Journal of the Plague Year, I’m finding it very calming and informative — perfect reading for today. He is describing an outbreak of the bubonic plague in London in the mid-17th century, as seen and recorded — most likely — by his uncle. One thing immediately jumped out at me: Everyone is up in arms about vaccine passports and covid test certificates rolled out to limit our movement and activity, as if this is a fresh kind of modern totalitarianism dreamed up by Bill Gates and our tech overlords. No doubt our tech overlords are cashing in to the max. But, like a lot of things, turns out nothing is new under the sun. As Defoe writes, they had a very strict health passport system for travel back then. Towns wouldn’t even let you pass through without them, if you were trying to flee London for the countryside.
In London itself, the government’s health measures were very brutal. Probably one of the most heavy handed was that they’d shut in entire families — with their servants and help — into their homes and keep them there for about month under constant guard, if anyone in a household came down with the plague.