We Did Not Escape: Thoughts on COVID-19
Roberts bears witness, pithy as it may be, to the disease we now have been asked to live with--again.
"So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, and that the whole world encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard and examined; and so that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun."
This quote is from a Franciscan friar named John Clyn. A friar living in Ireland, this quote comes from the last page of his diary he kept during the Black Death; they now exist as one of our major sources on the Bubonic Plague and the way it ravished Europe.
As COVID-19 rages, one sees Clyn's blank pages as something almost ominous; they are something like a spoiled dream, or like waking up in a nightmare. Clyn left those pages, I believe, for someone to follow in his footsteps and to continue to document the Black Death. In a time when the dead wait for death, where the world was (or was felt to have been) encompassed by evil, Friar Clyn believed he had to write about this plague for the benefit of the species and its future; a future he could not be sure would come to pass. And yet, he wagered for the human race, rather than against it; he hoped we would continue his work and we would learn.
Clyn left space for a continued bearing witness of the truth in the face of a disease; and yet, I cannot shake the feeling that what he left was space for a future plague, rather than a future generation. This plague is the one we are now enduring; a plague with many ills, encompassing the world in evil, whose dead wait for death. Has the work failed? Or has the writing perished, even as we have conserved it?
What could we put in the extra parchment Friar Clyn left us?
All that I can now write is this: that the sons of Adams did not escape the pestilence; they merely survived to witness it again.