This story was written by Mark Dundas Wood for The Clyde Fitch Report. CFR produces and publishes opinion and reporting at the crossroads of arts and politics.
In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the newly dead Emily Gibbs asks the Stage Manager: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?”
The Stage Manager tells Emily no.
But then he adds, with a touch of hope: “The saints and poets, maybe — they do some.”
No lines from any other literary work have made a larger impression on me than the ones in that exchange. When I first read them back in high school, I felt I should aim to be like Wilder’s poets. (I knew I could never aspire to sainthood.) And I think I’ve done a fair job of living with that aim. I don’t consider my own life or mortality every, every minute. But I regularly measure time in my head: marking anniversaries, centenaries; noting the passage of the years; calculating how many years I may have left.
One milestone I observed recently was the two-year anniversary of writing about books for The Clyde Fitch Report. And I’ve done plenty of time-line contemplation in the pieces I’ve written. For instance, in 2017 I covered a book marking the centenary of John F. Kennedy’s birth. Earlier this year, I was drawn to a study of the political upheaval that took place around the world in 1968, precisely half a century ago.
And now I’ve read a book that would put anyone in mind of mortal coils, of the fragility of a lifespan. British writer Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918 is a study of the worldwide influenza outbreak (commonly called Spanish flu) that claimed as many as 100 million lives worldwide at the very time people were slaughtering one another with fighter planes and mustard gas, near the end of World War I.
Life to me was just lots of Italians living together…. For every little affair — baptisms, birthdays, Communion — we had a party. It was always parties, parties, parties.
But then came the pandemic. Suddenly, down the block, coffins piled up outside the morgue. John and his young friends wound up playing on them, and one day he fell and broke his nose on one. His mother chided him. Didn’t he realize there were people in those boxes?
Days later, John knocked on his pals’ doors, but nobody came out. His mother told John that God had taken them.
Pandemic 1918 is full of figures. We learn that 14,000 miners in South Africa fell ill by late September 1918. We’re told that 8,573 New Zealanders died from the flu, including 2,160 Maori people. The statistics become mind-numbing at points. It’s the personal accounts, such as Delano’s, that make the human toll fathomable and real. The world didn’t realize fully at the time exactly what had hit them. The strain of influenza that stalked humanity in 1918 was unusual for the swiftness and power with which it struck. It hungered to kill robust young adults, not just infants and the aged. You could feel alive and well in the morning and be rapping at death’s door by nightfall. Lungs filled with pus; faces turned blue.
It strikes me as odd how little people now know about, talk about or care about this pandemic, just as younger people today have so little sense of how the AIDS outbreak changed life in the 1980s. I told one friend about Arnold’s book, and he was completely unaware of the 1918 crisis. The fact that scientists have not been able to learn all they need to know about the virus should give us all pause — especially as deadly new iterations of avian flu might very well emerge. But there are so many other crises going on now. Who wants to be reminded of a season of death 100 years ago?