Reflections on the Plague
The following reflections aren’t in regard to the plague, but what we may understand of people’s reactions to it. It’s a matter, then, of reflecting on the ease with which an entire society felt it had been contaminated, isolating itself in their houses and suspending normal living conditions, work relationships, those of friendship, love and even its religious and political convictions. Why were there, as it would have been easy to imagine and often occurs in these cases, no protests or opposition? The hypothesis I’d like to suggest is that in some way, perhaps even unknowingly, the plague was already here. Evidently the conditions of people’s lives were such that it was enough for an unexpected sign to appear showing how it really was, that is, intolerable, as with a plague. And, in a certain sense, this is the only positive given that we can take from the present situation: it’s possible that, at some later date, people may ask themselves if the way in which we lived was right.
And to a no lesser extent it’s worth reflecting on the need for religion that the situation brings to light. There’s a clue in the media’s hammering use of terminology taken from eschatological vocabularies that, describing the phenomenon, recurs obsessively, above all in the American press, with the word “apocalypse,” often explicitly evoking the end of the world…
