Wood Chips
From the shores of Lake Superior (The Third Coast)
As a global community, but also as a small neighborhood here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we are experiencing these days hard, tough, and bitter lessons in humility. Fierce landscapes of rock and forest, ice and snow surround us most of the year here teaching us to measure and appreciate our days. But now the global pandemic has devastated airline travel, put on-hold long anticipated trips and reunions with friends and family. According to the CDC, it’s been responsible for 160,000 deaths in the United States since March of 2020.
In a recent book review printed in the New York Times, Laura Marris quotes the French novelist Albert Camus on what such experiences teach us about being watchful, attentive, and cautious. Camus warns against high expectations, challenging more popular beliefs that if we just find the right vaccine all shall be well. Writing in 1947, Camus set his story “The Plague” in French Algeria. Some critics regard it as a commentary on the human condition, a metaphor about rise of the Third Reich in Germany. Marris thinks it also carries an important, cautious message about expectations for us facing COVID-19 in 2020.
“Indeed, as he heard the cries of delight rising from the city that a serum (vaccine) had been found, Rieux remembered that this delight was always threatened, for he knew what this joyous crowd did not, and what you can read in books – that the germ of the plaque never dies or disappears, that it can lie dormant for decades in furniture and linens, that it waits patiently in rooms, in basements, in trunks, among handkerchiefs and paperwork, and that perhaps the day would come when, for the sorrow and education of men, the plaque would revive its rats and dispatch them to die in a happy city.”
Jon Magnuson
The Cedar Tree Institute
“Wood Chips” is a series of brief reflections written by Jon Magnuson, Director of the Cedar Tree Institute.
