![]() ![]() But - as I have now, belatedly, discovered - there’s no substitute for finally sitting down and reading the 1947 novel “ The Plague,” by Albert Camus. ![]() Some books are so venerated, so sacralized, they are almost forbidding to the touch. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, readers seized for obvious reasons on one of these, Orwell’s “ 1984.” Now, understandably, they’re reaching for the other. In the relatively brief period of time between, say, Hiroshima and the dawn of the somnolent ’50s, as Keynesian policymakers were designing the welfare state, two writers produced two masterpieces of political introspection. The last time the globe experienced a huge, simultaneous, nearly universal reset was immediately after World War II. He doesn’t dare come closer, but he has something he wants to say: “Perhaps this will be a Great Reset.” A friend emails from the Bay Area to say she’s baked her first loaf of bread another writes from Australia to say that this epidemic will be “a giant mirror held up to everyone,” and that he is reading Mary Shelley’s “ The Last Man.” A neighbor walking his dog halloos from across the fence. ![]() We are living in the eerie, low-pressure vacuum before the storm. In my self-isolating household in upstate New York, the pandemic has thus far produced boredom eating, boredom watching, hiking, candlelight dinners and, later in the evening, some reading out loud. ![]()
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