Class News
Stephen Greenblatt ’64 writes two coronavirus-themed articles in The New Yorker
Stephen Greenblatt published the following two articles in March 2020 in The New Yorker, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. See also a brief video interview with Stephen at the foot of this page
Stephen is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.
- The Strange Terror of Watching the Coronavirus Take Rome
- Invisible Bullets: What Lucretius Taught Us About Pandemics
The Strange Terror of Watching the Coronavirus Take Rome
Stephen Greenblatt
The New Yorker
March 4, 2020
In the past few weeks, as the virus spread, Rome emptied out;
the crowds lining up to enter the Colosseum have thinned.
Two weeks ago, I sent an e-mail from Rome, where I had been enjoying a sabbatical semester of research and writing, to a Chinese friend who lives in one of those small cities of five or six million inhabitants, very far from Wuhan, the original epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic. In my note, I said that I was sure that she was safely distant from the current crisis, but that, all the same, I was thinking of her and beaming her my warmest wishes. She replied politely that she was happy that I was having such a lovely sabbatical. As for her, however, though she was in good health, her life and the lives of everyone around her were turned topsy-turvy. The streets in her city were empty; places of work were all closed; she and her family were confined at home; one of them per day might receive permission to go out, masked, to shop for food and supplies; everyone lived in fear. I was suitably embarrassed by my e-mail’s ridiculous insouciance, but at the time I did not fully grasp the extent of my stupidity.
I get it now, thanks to the unfolding events in Italy. The initial reports of an outbreak, in a few towns in the north of the country, were alarming enough, but it remained news coming from far away. With astonishing rapidity, the situation worsened: in quick succession, whole communities were quarantined; schools and churches closed their doors; museums, galleries, and palaces were shuttered; concerts were canceled. If anyone hadn’t already taken in the gravity of the situation, two further occurrences made it overwhelmingly apparent: parts of Milan Fashion Week, the crown jewel of one of Italy’s greatest economic successes, were closed to the public, and, still more ominously, the soccer game between Inter Milan and a rival was played before an eerily empty stadium. As any Italian knows, soccer, far more than religion, is sacred; denying fans access to the match was an even more drastic signal than temporarily closing Milan Cathedral to tourists and the faithful.
In Rome, the virus had not yet surfaced, and there were very few signs of alarm, apart from a run on hand sanitizer. But, as the constant reports in the newspapers and on television accumulated, the mood altered. The news from the north, we began to say to one another, resembled the thud of artillery shells exploding in a battle somewhere across the mountains, out of sight but no longer so far distant as to be inaudible. And then steadily the enemy moved across Lombardy and Veneto and south into Tuscany and Umbria. Where were our defenders? If we were to continue the military metaphor, we had to concede that Venice was gravely threatened, then Bergamo, then Florence. Rome would fall soon.
But, as our conversations about the virus continued — and it was increasingly impossible to talk about anything else — the image of an approaching army gave way to other attempts to understand what was happening. Of course, even in the popular press, there was no end of epidemiological articles, often quite serious and detailed ones written by experts, along with the familiar lists of advice: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, clean all surfaces, keep washing your hands, move away from people who are coughing, avoid crowds, try to stay at least one meter away from everyone else. But, however informative all of this is — and we consumed a vast amount of it in only a few days — in situations of stress, it is, as usual, literature that offers the most powerful ways of grasping what is happening or may come to pass, not in the precise biological sense but in its narrative unfolding. So our conversations turned to Saramago’s Blindness, Camus’s The Plague, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and, above all — the greatest of these fictional depictions — the opening chapter of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The problem is that, as brilliant as these accounts are, they depict cultures in the grip of epidemic disease as collapsing into chaos, violence, and the rupturing of social bonds. But this is not at all what we were reading about in the newspapers or experiencing for ourselves. In China, if the accounts are accurate, there is something like the opposite: an extraordinary intensification of social order, figured in the software with which the government tracks many citizens’ health and movement. In Italy, there has been no comparable intensification — quite apart from the technology, such control is quite alien to the national character — but instead the marked presence of the warmth and kindness that make ordinary life here so agreeable, notwithstanding the country’s notorious political dysfunction. It is as if people instinctively sense, even as their anxiety levels rise and their economy sinks, that their version of social order rests on good humor, patience, inventiveness, and flexibility. The mother and son who run the fruit and vegetable stand at the outdoor market, the local genius who concocts wildly implausible flavors of gelato, the clerk at the nearby gym who somehow remembered (or pretended to remember) that I had a temporary membership four years ago and waived the initiation fee — all seem, under the pressure of the crisis, somehow to hold onto their innate sweetness.
It is a different narrative — and a different literary model — that helps to explain why I am writing these paragraphs not in Rome but on a plane back to the United States. Living on the top of a high hill, in a neighborhood not frequented by tourists, at first I had not noticed anything strange, but then I walked through the historic center, and it hit me: in the past few weeks, as the virus spread, the city emptied out. The crowds lining up to enter the Colosseum or visit the Forum have thinned; the mobs throwing coins in the Trevi Fountain or climbing the Spanish Steps have all but vanished; restaurants and bars usually overflowing with patrons are almost vacant. It is customary, of course, to lament the phenomenon of mass tourism in Italy; even the tourists themselves grumble and dream (as I do) of how nice it would be to visit the Sistine Chapel in solitary splendor. But the actual effect of the emptying out, at least for the current reason, is terrifying. Three nights ago, going to a friend’s house for dinner at 8 p.m., we walked through the Piazza Navona, the most beautiful square in the world, and were completely alone.
The literary model here is not Decameron, with porters bearing planks piled high with corpses and survivors torn between secluding themselves in closed-up houses and indulging in riotous excess. Instead, it is Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, with the doomed hero, madly in love with the beautiful boy, failing to notice that all the other guests in the hotel have fled the cholera epidemic. Of course, the locals who run the hotel do not flee; it is their city, and they have no choice but to stay. But poor Aschenbach could have gone home. Perhaps the plague would have followed him there, but at least he would have reëntered his own world, as I am about to do when my plane lands.
Invisible Bullets: What Lucretius Taught Us About Pandemics
Stephen Greenblatt
The New Yorker
March 16, 2020
Recent reports from Italy detail many of the philosopher Lucretius’ quarantined countrymen standing out on their balconies and singing in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
In 1585, the greatest Elizabethan scientist, Thomas Harriot, was sent by his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, to the nascent English colony in Virginia to assess the natural resources, observe the Algonquian inhabitants, and weigh the colonists’ chances of survival. Harriot, who went out of his way to learn at least some of the Carolina Algonquian language and to establish what he calls a “special familiarity with some of their priests,” was impressed by much of what he observed. He admired the natives’ skills in agriculture, hunting, and fishing; their eloquent, dignified leaders; their strong family and clan bonds.
The English were only a small, ragged band of men — Raleigh had sent no women at this exploratory stage — in a vast, uncharted land inhabited by well-organized, prosperous, and proud peoples. Harriot saw that they could not be effortlessly subjugated. But, as he wrote in “A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia,” from 1588, he was confident that the colonists could profit from their manifest technological superiority: “guns, books, writing and reading, spring clocks that seem to go of themselves,” etc. And the new arrivals, though small in number, had an additional advantage. Wherever the English went, Harriot reported, if any of the natives plotted against them, “within a few days after our departure from every such town, the people began to die very fast, and many in short space; in some towns about twenty, in some forty, in some sixty and in one six score, which in truth was very many in respect of their numbers. . . . The disease also so strange, that they neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it, the like by report of the oldest men in the country never happened before, time out of mind.”
Harriot was observing, of course, the terrifying effects of viruses — smallpox, measles, influenza, and the like — on a population that had been entirely unexposed to them, but he interpreted these effects as a providential punishment on those natives who “used some practice against us.” For their part, the Algonquians also perceived that there was a relation between the epidemics and the new arrivals, but, as Harriot noted, they had a very different explanation of what was happening. They speculated that the handful of colonists was only the beginning. There were more, they feared, yet to come, “to kill theirs and take their places.” “Those that were immediately to come after us [the first English colonists],” Harriot wrote, “they imagined to be in the air, yet invisible and without bodies, and that they by our entreaty and for the love of us did make the people die . . . by shooting invisible bullets into them.”
“Invisible bullets”: the Algonquians used the murderous technology that the English had brought into their midst as a brilliant metaphor for the disease that the colonists had also introduced, a disease that they correctly feared would facilitate the destruction of their society. That Harriot took the trouble to record this metaphor is a mark of his unusual gifts as an ethnographer, but it may also reflect his own speculative interests. Officially, he articulated the notion, so reassuring to his English readers, that the disease struck those who were secretly plotting against the colonists, and hence that it was “the special work of God.” (In the circular logic that always characterizes such explanations, the evidence for the existence of the conspiracies is precisely the death of the alleged conspirators.) But Harriot was suspected throughout his career of being an atheist, and more specifically of being a disciple of the ancient Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. And Lucretius, as it happens, devoted particular attention to epidemics.
In his philosophical masterpiece On the Nature of Things, written around 50 B.C.E., Lucretius laid out the arguments for a radical materialism. Humans should not cower in fear of divine punishment, he wrote, or perform slavish sacrificial offerings in the hope of divine rewards. The universe is not the mysterious plaything of gods or demons; it consists of atoms and emptiness and nothing else. The atoms — Lucretius called them semina rerum, “the seeds of things” — are in movement, endlessly swerving, colliding, combining, separating, and recombining in new and unforeseen patterns. There is, in all of this movement, no fixed pattern, no overarching intention, no trace of intelligent design. Instead, over a boundless expanse of time and space, there are ceaseless, random mutations. Old forms are constantly dying; new forms are constantly surging up.
For Lucretius, this vision was profoundly consoling: instead of fretting about the gods or worrying about the afterlife, you should focus your attention on this world, the only one you will ever experience, and calmly go about enhancing pleasure for yourself and for everyone around you. But he knew that the news he brought was not unequivocally reassuring. If diseases were not inflicted upon you by angry gods, they nonetheless had to come from somewhere, namely from the same ceaselessly swirling atoms that produced everything else. The seeds of things, he wrote (in Rolfe Humphries’s translation),
Are necessary to support our lives.
By the same token, it is obvious
That all around us noxious particles
Are flying, motes of sickness and of death.
When particles hostile to us begin to move, confusion stirs, “and changes are enforced / In our familiar quarters.” At such times, something strange happens to the world we thought we so intimately knew. The sky above our heads seems at once like itself and alien, and the things that enable existence come to seem deeply threatening. The plague, Lucretius writes,
Falls on the water or the grain fields, falls
On other nourishment of beasts and men,
Or hangs suspended in the very air
From which our breath inhales it, draws it down
All through our bodies.
Small wonder that gloom descends on people’s faces, and that minds become unsettled with melancholy and fear. In On the Nature of Things, Lucretius ends with a harrowing account of the devastating epidemic that struck Athens during the Peloponnesian War. That the poem abruptly closes on such a dark note has led many scholars to conclude that Lucretius must have left it unfinished. There was even a legend that he died suddenly from the effects of a love potion, given to him by his wife.
Perhaps this is so. But our current struggle with the covid-19 pandemic casts the poem’s ending in a different light. A plague, after all, tests us in unique ways. It ruthlessly takes the measure of our values, calls into question our familiar assumptions, shines a pitiless light on our social and political and religious order. As I sit here in my “voluntary self-isolation” — for I have only recently returned to the United States from Italy — I wonder if the poem’s closing focus on epidemic disease might, in fact, have been fully intended. This is precisely the existential challenge, Lucretius thought, that any society worth inhabiting and any philosophy worth embracing must address. When everything is going well, it is easy enough to contemplate our place in the material world. But what if everything is not going well — if mutations in the seeds of things bring disease and death? Only if you can face the invisible bullets all around us, and still keep calm, remain rational, and somehow find it possible to take pleasure in life, have you learned the lesson that the poem set out to teach.
To judge from the news, most of us seem very far from this Epicurean achievement. But the recent reports from Italy, which detail many of Lucretius’ quarantined countrymen standing out on their balconies and singing in the midst of the plague, give me hope. They remind us that, alongside science, the other realm in which human resilience and inventiveness are at their height is art. In Lucretius, the two are joined: his philosophical disquisition on atoms, pleasure, and the plague takes the form of a poem, a song to be sung.
Postscript from Tony Lavely, ’64 Class Secretary:
Shortly after Stephen Greenblatt’s article on Lucretius appeared in The New Yorker, Stephen was interviewed about Lucretius by Tom Holland on the show JLF Brave New World. We add the video below for your further enjoyment. Also, Stephen informed me that, with his friend Jill Lepore at JLF Brave New World, he is about to launch for The New Yorker (on their Instagram site) a series called “Books for the Midnight Hour.” The first episodes will feature Stephen talking about Hamlet and Jill talking about The Federalist Papers.”