In the long-ago times of Just A Few Weeks Ago, a friend’s son moved to NYC with some college buddies. When the city closed down, Rob and his friends (all working in “non-essential services”) decided not to stay holed up in a tiny apartment crowded with too many large guys. They jumped in a car and drove off to a lake home owned by one set of parents. Rob sent his mom a cute photo of him in quarantine – with a glass of red wine in one hand, his laptop on his knees, and a lovely lake in the background.
Some people blame the rich for fleeing NYC, and perhaps carrying COVID-19 along as an unwelcome passenger. I’m not sure I do – at least if they had no symptoms and quarantined themselves effectively when they got wherever they were going. (And stayed put when they got there. And washed their hands religiously.) Arguments can be made, but that’s a controversy for the more fiercely political of us. I’m thinking of how Rob and his buddies are passing the time in quarantine.
With a computers and internet, Rob’s friends have almost infinite ways to divert themselves — from the increasingly grim news to computer games to movies to video parties with friends quarantined in other places. But imagine this: What if the internet were to crash? Without their devices, what are these smart young men going to do? After they try (and fail) to fix the problem, they’ll grouse about it a while. But later that evening, when they settle down after a nice dinner, they’re going to retreat to an older form of entertainment: they’re going to tell stories.
Now, add one little twist to this scenario. Imagine that one of the guys has brought along his girlfriend, plus a few of her friends. Voila. Suddenly you’ve assembled all the ingredients you need for a charming sitcom – one that reprises a famous and delightful work of medieval literature, Boccaccio’s Decameron. It’s not the usual type of literature to come out of a plague.
As Jill Lepore recently reminded us in The New Yorker, the emotional engine of plague literature is the darkness of horror tales. Surprising and violent, the disease arrives. It is inexplicable and inescapable, a contagion that spreads from outsiders but erupts from inside the body, with no one and everyone to blame. It mows down families, cities, nations. It kills mechanically and relentlessly. We are powerless before it. From Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” to the film Contagion, portrayals of plagues make us shiver and grieve the fictional loss of everything we hold dear.
The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron is grim, too. It’s spring of 1348, and the Black Death is threatening Florence. Other Italian cities have been nearly wiped out; the Florentines know what is coming. They prepare as best they can: they close the gates of the city, they pray to God and the saints, they look for medical treatments. None of it stops the plague. As the numbers of the dead climb, some Florentines drink and make merry while others live moderately and sensibly. Both types die. Within a week, people are succumbing by the thousands. Social structures break down; bodies are thrown into mass graves; the sick die alone.
Against this backdrop of nearly universal death, Boccaccio asserts life. Seven young women meet in a church, mourning their families. Their homes are now empty and echoing. One of them – Pampinea, the most practical – makes a proposal: Rather than wait helplessly in the chaotic city for death (or rape by looters), they should flee as a group to their summer homes in the hills. When the timid ones shrink from traveling without male protection, Pampinea counters that they could ask some surviving men of their acquaintance to join them, as escorts. (The narrator hints that Pampinea has schemed to achieve this result.) No one has a better idea, so the seven young women and three young men pack and set off, together.
They’ve been through horrors and still don’t know whether they’ll survive, but they’re young and resilient. Once they arrive at a lovely estate above the city, they breathe a sigh of relief. But like many of us these days, they find themselves without the tasks that have always structured their days. So they organize themselves. They appoint a Queen or King for each day, who decrees the day’s activities. They play chess, ride horses, dine, flirt, and in the sleepy afternoons, tell stories.
As to the stories themselves – well, the stories are what you’d expect from a group of smart, well-brought-up, college-age kids left on their own. There are tales of revenge, romantic love, practical jokes, philosophy, and sex. Lots and lots of sex. Some of the sex is tragic and romantic in the vein of Romeo and Juliet; some of it is adulterous, almost blasphemous, and very, very funny. (Imagine monks who try to escape from the bedrooms of adulterous wives by pretending to be archangels. Imagine husbands who set them on window ledges and challenge them to fly.) Like film-goers of the 1930s, the young aristocrats of fourteenth-century Florence want something to make them laugh.
And seven hundred years later, so do we. Craving the truth of the moment, we turn to the news — including obituaries — and to gritty fictions that connect us to characters enduring similar traumas. Then, gloomy and anxious, we seek out hope and laughter. We watch cat videos and silly movies on Netflix. We watch Italians sing from their balconies and apartment-dwellers hammer on pans to thank health-care workers. We satisfy our need to embrace life as fiercely as we are confronting death. As Mark Jarman writes in the poem “Interesting Times,”
Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy,
the pivot of event.
You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with
the story’s arc.
A few writers have the turn of mind – and the talent – to give us the dark and light in one package. There’s Shakespeare, of course: Mercutio fooling around right up until the moment he falls dead from a sword-stroke; Hamlet taunting gullible old Polonius (partly to disguise himself as mad, partly to amuse himself); the fool in Lear mocking the angry old king he loves and never abandons. Dickens and Dostoevsky do it brilliantly, too – especially in Great Expectations and Brothers Karamazov – as well as some postmodern novelists like Jonathon Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo). For such writers, comedy is the warp, tragedy the weft of their work’s texture.
The Decameron is a little different. Only at the beginning and end of the book do we feel the shadow of the plague hovering close. Death provides a dark backdrop to the tales, like the shadowy background of a Vermeer, which makes the sunshine falling on a vase of flowers shine brighter by contrast. It gives weight and pathos to Boccaccio’s group of young people, who keep civilization alive with their friendships, their exchanges of stories, their flirting, and their insistence on laughter.
Friendship, love, and laughter – we need them, too. In these days when an early-morning trip to the grocery store feels like a trip behind enemy lines, they keep us afloat. Thanks to everyone who provides them!
Wow Nancy, this is brilliant. I feel part of history-and not just the 21st century. Now all is needed are the stories of these young men in upper state New York.
Thanks! Yes, I’d love it if some talented thirty-something wrote that updated Decameron. Wouldn’t it be fun to hear their stories?
Room Tone
March 19th, 2020 4:30 pm
I just read Annie Dillard’s account of a total eclipse, which she witnessed years ago on the Eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains, near Yakima and the apple-fruited plains of central Washington. Her words were like a strange feast – intoxicating, mildly toxic, a sled-ride into an experience of death, an experience of being at a total loss for words. She described screams coming from the mouths of strangers and her own mouth, screaming at the sight of a wall of darkness rushing toward the gathering at 1,200 miles an hour, total annihilating blackness. She was a drowning person being pulled too deep to survive, knowing lifeless, meaningless distance, then, somehow, being washed up on shore, heart still beating. Blinking, she hears a young man, with a Hasselblad, say, “did you see that? The sun looked like a Life Saver up in the sky.” She latches onto those two words and they are enough to gradually resuscitate her whole mind’s consciousness. She comes to the surface, awake.
I put the Kindle down and looked around the living room. In the complete motionless quiet of my first work-free day of a quarantined staycation, I saw myself looking at all the familiar things – Little Sally (painted by Jack Folinsbee), the Chinese scroll, M’Lisa’s tiny landscape hung on the kitchen beam, the metal rocking antelope riding alone in the clerestory by the dining table, the curated chaos of objects on top of the oak corner liquor cabinet. The world gets quiet when I take out my hearing aids. This coronavirus-global-staying-at-home feels like the world has taken out its hearing aids. There is a motionless, soundless hush over all the houses, streets and trees. I’ve never been in an afternoon this quiet and still – even at a silent retreat.
I’ve never loved a quietness like this before. It could be like death. It is so much the opposite of mindlessness. I am more awake to myself, to Sally and Dolph. Dolph is out on a shopping foray. I hear every small sound outside the house as if it might be him returning. But, for now, Sally and I float in a quietness I have never experienced before, an unexplored continent of acute awareness. “Weren’t you going to write?” she asked. I was sort of headed here, to writing in my writing room. But I might have veered to the MacBook and unread email. It was on my list to write, but her question helped set me here at the tiger maple table which will become our dining table in Seattle. I sat down and closed the door. Once the door has closed, I have begun. It feels precious to keep a promise. I’m making good on that dream I had – punching the world from my gimpy right shoulder all the way down to my hand, grasping a pen as a substitute for a clenched fist.
I take a few breaths, barely making a sound. I realize this “corona quiet” leaves me with enough inner and outer silence to hear my heart beat all the time, anytime I want, anytime I pause. The first day of unencumbered quiet, a cancelled Bahamas vacation. Lush silence, ample time for micro-awareness.
I stop again and wonder whom am I writing for? For me is different than for someone else. For me offers a space to discover where I am or take me into an unknown place. For someone else makes me think of our sons finding this, many years from now. Their 74 yo father writing in the soundless afternoon of the first day of his staycation. I’m thinking of the new space of connection with Dolph. I’ve never felt this degree of ease around him, this ease of being myself and watching him be his self. It’s a marvel – something I didn’t see coming, something I never expected. I can’t even say (although I’ve used the expression) it is a dream come true. It is a whole new reality, for which I feel no authorship. It has simply happened. And it has happened at a time when all I feel I could bring to it was a readiness to enter it. I’ve been able to say a few things like “put away your tools when you’re done with them,” or “put things back where you found them; then you’ll know where they are, and so will we.” He has more or less complied. No anxiety. No angst.
Yesterday, in this quiet, I told him about a Heinrich Böll short story, “Murke’s Gesammeltes Schweigen”. Dr. Murke’s “collected silences” is about a radio engineer who kept a tape of all the tiny clips of silence he had edited out of interviews over the years. He liked to relax in the evening and listen to the cobbled minutes of silence he had made. I’d read the story in my college German class. Then Dolph told me what sound editors do during the making of a movie. After the action, the scene and the actors are all finished and gone, the sound editors like to lay down a few minutes of tape just recording the space, the room, in its after state. They call it “recording some minutes of room tone.” I never knew Dolph knew about room tone. I know I had never heard of it. Room tone. And as the minute hand tells me I have come to the end of an hour, a kept promise, it seems that “room tone” is what I am so struck by in this still-keeping, promise-keeping, contagion-avoiding, self-imposed, home-based hermitage.
Wow, Randy, that was GREAT. I’d love to see if we can craft it into a blog post of its own, about quietness.