The First Lines of 10 Classic Novels,
Rewritten for Social Distancing
Famous Lines of Poetry
Revised for the Age of Coronavirus
To Watch:
The Exterminating Angel (1962, by Luis Bunuel)
The Plague (1992, with William Hurt, Raul Julia, Robert Duvall)
Based on the 1947 novel by Albert Camus
Compared to COVID - 19
In 1947, Camus reflected on Nazism and authoritarianism,
using the plague as a metaphor of misery and suffering.
His observations remain true:
"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."
Additional Classics
Death in Venice (1912) & Magic Mountain (1924)
both by Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955)
The Decameron (1492)
by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375)
A Journal of the Plague Year: 1665 (1722)
by Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731)
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939)
by Katherine Anne Porter (1890 – 1980)
Fever 1793 (2000)
by Laurie Halse Anderson
Recent Discoveries
The Fatal Eggs (1925)
by Mikhail Bulgavok (1891 - 1940)
The Fatal Eggs and Other Soviet Satire
Translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Non - Fiction
The Great Influenza:
The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry
On the Quotidian Kit
from
A Litany in Time of Plague
alternately entitled:
In Time of Pestilence, 1593
by
Thomas Nashe (1567 - 1601)
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!
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Our favorite local book store Von’s!
charming photo from her miniature light - up village.
