bsh1 Memorial Profile Pick of the Week No. 20- CORONA is LATIN for CROWN, VIRUS is LATIN for POISON

Author: oromagi
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Coronavirus

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oromagi
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A Litany in Time of Plague

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life's lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds open her gate.
"Come, come!" the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death's bitterness;
Hell's executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage
,Earth but a player's stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

-Thomas Nashe
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from Love in the Time of Cholera

Behind her, so close to her ear that only she could hear it in the tumult, she heard his voice:
“This is not the place for a crowned goddess.”

She turned her head and saw, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, those other glacial eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified with fear, just as she had seen them in the crowd at Midnight Mass the first time he was so close to her, but now, instead of the commotion of love, she felt the abyss of disenchantment. In an instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. She just managed to think: My God, poor man! Florentino Ariza smiled, tried to say something, tried to follow her, but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand.

“No, please,” she said to him. “Forget it.”

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(translation: Edith Grossman)

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oromagi
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from ANGELS in AMERICA


EUROPA: This is the Tome of Immobility, of respite, of cessation. Drink of its bitter water once, Prophet, and never thirst again.

PRIOR: I... can't. (Prior puts the Book on the table. He removes his prophet robes, revealing the hospital gown underneath. He places the robe by the Book) I still want. . . . My blessing. Even sick. I want to be alive.

ANGEL: You only think you do. Life is a habit with you. You have not seen what is to come: We have: What will the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days bring? That you or any Being should wish to endure them? Death more plenteous than all Heaven has tears to mourn it, The slow dissolving of the Great Design, The spiraling apart of the Work of Eternity, The World and its beautiful particle logic All collapsed. All dead, forever, In starless, moonlorn onyx night. We are failing, failing, The Earth and the Angels. (The sound of a great generator, failing. The lights dim.)

ANGEL: Look up, look up, It is Not-to-Be Time. Oh who asks of the Orders Blessing With Apocalypse Descending? Who demands: More Life? When Death like a Protector Blinds our eyes, shielding from tender nerve More horror than can be borne. Let any Being on whom Fortune smiles Creep away to Death Before that last dreadful daybreak When all your ravaging returns to you With the rising, scorching, unrelenting Sun: When morning blisters crimson And bears all life away, A tidal wave of Protean Fire That curls around the planet And bares the Earth clean as bone.

(Pause.)

PRIOR: But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse, but.... You see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but. . . . Bless me anyway. I want more life

-Tony Kushner


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from The Plague

The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.

― Albert Camus

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from The Retreating Horizon of Time in Quarantine

As space constricts, for many of us, to the four walls of our houses and apartments, time seems to have overflowed its usual containers. It feels as if we have stowed away in the belly of a ship, uncertain of the duration of the voyage and without a view of the stars to chart our positions. A day feels one way when we imagine weeks of this, another way when we imagine months. The port appears to be receding as we approach it: a week ago, it felt like the journey-less journey on the S.S. Sameness would be over in late March, then in early April. On Monday, the President mentioned “July or August.” News reports later that day seemed to suggest that we’d be living more or less this way until a vaccine for Covid-19 was available, in perhaps eighteen months. (Much worse fates than boredom may await some of us, if the terrifying forecasts hold.)

What should we do to keep our eyes off the retreating horizon? The sixteenth-century scholar Erasmus often read while seated backward on his horse, and wrote some of his famous treatise “The Praise of Folly” on horseback. “I thought I ought to do something, at least,” he wrote to Thomas More, “since that time seemed hardly suited to serious thinking.” The crews on whaling ships made scrimshaw; the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” jogged on the ceiling, in zero gravity, or played chess against their computer, HAL. On Twitter, the literary journal A Public Space announced that it would host a communal reading, twelve pages per day, of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”—a novel that is synonymous with the time it takes to read it, and one of our culture’s enduring symbols of near-endlessness. As the harried bookworm, played by Burgess Meredith, exclaims at the end of an iconic “Twilight Zone” episode, after he settles into a pile of post-nuclear rubble and gets cracking on a stack of books: now, finally, we have “time enough at last.”

The hoary ethic of temporal improvement seems once again relevant. This essay is an example of an improvement, taken up between obligations.

-Dan Chiasson
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@oromagi
What is this?

I still don't know.

Are you going to tell me this time?
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@TheRealNihilist
barcelona to daytona
everybodys got corona
arizona to verona
every spots hot with corona
forrest gump has got mumps
idris elbas got the dumps
miley cyrus has the virus
christian wood but not ol' trump
arizona to verona
every spots hot with corona
barcelona to daytona
everybodys got corona