Social Distancing, and - A Place In The Sun

                                           A Place In The Sun,  an original acrylic painting
                                           16" X 20" , unframed

                                              ( click on image to enlarge )
 

     My last posting to this blog was titled Beware the ides of March.  I was using that
famous quotation as a duel reference to both our current pandemic as well as in its
original, ominous warning to Julius Caesar in forty four BC.  Caesar didn't heed the
warning, resulting in his assassination, followed by two hundred years of bloody, civil
war, and culminating with the new emperor executing the Roman senators who favored
the loosing, republican cause.
     Last January, we had our own ominous warnings, about this deadly, new virus
which was headed our way, but the leadership in Washington didn't heed the alarm.
Trump dismissed this new threat as just another simple, flu outbreak, which would
evaporate when the weather warmed up.  That miscalculation on the part of the
president, resulted in the nation being ill-prepared and ill-equipped to fight off this
catastrophic disease.

   So, now we have to learn to accustom ourselves to a whole new lifestyle of social
distancing, isolating and hiding away in our individual bunkers.  This is particularly
hard to bare for the extroverts among us, for whom the daily interaction with others
is like the bread of life.  It is going to be difficult for many, to try and adopt a more
introverted, self-sufficiency, and find comfort in our own. inner beings.
     This situation is not really new of course.  When we review the relatively short
history of western civilization, we remember that plagues have been a fairly frequent
occurrence.  The most devastating was the black death pandemic (1347 to 1351 in
Europe) which resulted in global deaths of up to a hundred and a quarter million,
and killed thirty to sixty percent of Europeans.  It took two hundred years for the
European population to recover to its former levels, and some regions (such as
Florence) did not recover until the nineteenth century.
     The Florence region served as the setting for a literary classic of social distancing.
Boccaccio's Decameron is a collection of a hundred tales told by ten people, who
fled from Florence to a country villa, in an effort to escape the plague.  While they
maintain their distance from the plague ridden city, they tell each other stories, as a
way to entertain themselves during their isolation. The book had a far reaching
influence, including in the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Perhaps this current stay-at-home policy will give us all an opportunity to become
better story tellers.
     As our cabin fever continues to rise, maybe we should try to emulate the attitude
of our cats.  Cats have never had any difficulties with social distancing.  They often
disappear completely, until they hear the call of the food dish. Give them a quiet,
cozy spot in the sun to take a nap, and they are in utter contentment.  Perhaps, if and
when this is all over, we will be able to find our own, quiet places in the sun, to lick
our wounds and heal, but not forget the heroic efforts of all our health care workers.

                                                      Eugene P. McNerney