How long is this going to last?   Here in Illinois we continue to practice the advisory social distancing.  There is no order to remain at home as is the case in San Francisco, or the deployment of the National Guard as in New Rochelle, New York.  We Americans are quite slow to recognize that the choice is between freedom of movement or continuing to live.  Enjoy your freedom and be ravaged by a serious illness and almost certainly the loss of a family member, — you must choose now!

It is unclear how long the need to cease the usual habits of the work place, meeting a friend in a favorite restaurant, shopping at Jewel for necessities, etc. will last.  I know that I will not be attending the wedding of a family member in Vermont  in May.  Visiting Vermont for the first time will have to wait.  The family vacation in Michigan in July will give way to fighting the covid-19 virus.  I will likely revisit many times the memory from last year of the wide-eyed excitement of the two grand kids riding the carousel at Silver Beach at St. Joseph Michigan.

I continue to read The Plague by Albert Camus.  It is a fictional story of a plague outbreak in Oran Algeria.  Camus was French Algerian, and grew up in Algeria.  His experience of living under Nazi occupation in France served as the source for his creating this parable of what it is like to live under a lock down, in a struggle with an invisible adversary, that takes life irrationally, randomly.  Camus knew from first hand experience the front line of the battle was in the mind, the ability of the mind to “bounce back,” without being crushed, exceeding its limit in the circumstances.  The palpable sense of exile, of separation from loved ones, from habits that one knows, is open-ended.  That is the spear-point of the stress of our situation.

Yesterday in our household we had a belated St. Patty’s day celebration.  We toasted not only the Irish, but the presence of a new grand daughter Finlea René.  We toasted our good fortune as a family with raised flamingo-glasses of ice cream floats.  The ice cream was joined in the glass by a lime flavored Green River soda.  Green River is a Chicago soda-pop which helped the Schoenhofen Edelweiss Brewing Company of Chicago weather the Prohibition era of the 1920s.

Here is today’s passage from Camus telling of living day to day under conditions of exile, a locked-down city Oran, Algeria.

At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

— excerpt The Plague by Albert Camus p. 66

The underlined sentences are my own indications of emphasis.