What's Next?

It was Harry Potter Saturday at our house today: we read the final pages of Deathly Hallows and watched the last film. It's been a reliable activity for us over the last few years, and now it's over.

As we do around here these days, we'll adjust.

I did not mow the lawn today as I'd vowed to do, but it seems I'll be safe from the forecasted rain tomorrow until the evening.

Speaking of safety...

The threat of a pandemic hangs over your head from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed. You wonder a little every time you think about making a move that you'd never think twice about before. You wonder every time you cough. You wonder every time your throat feels a little bit sore. Could I have picked it up from that trip I took a couple of days ago? If I'm struck down by it and it's bad, will there be hospital space? Maybe you've seen those articles about the situation in Italy and read how triage works, how they'll be too many patients to treat, and you'll get a wristband, one of four colors.

If you get the black one, you're marked to leave to die.

You start to worry about this kind of worst-case scenario.

But living in fear of what you can't control is a fruitless exercise. This section of an essay from C.S. Lewis is making the rounds on social media with a note to replace "atomic" with "coronavirus." It's one of those things that is becoming ubiquitous, at least among the type of people I tend to follow, but it rings true:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948)