Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague

Zaretsky (The Subversive Simone Weil), a modern and classical languages professor at the University of Houston, examines in this searching if uneven collection how writers have weathered both physical and ideological plagues. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Zaretsky turned to familiar texts to make sense of things: “voices that were once familiar and comforting now struck me as edgy and tinged with urgency,” he writes. In “Daniel Defoe and the Great Plague of London,” he muses on the Quarantine Act of 1721, which said that those who attempted to escape quarantine could be sentenced to death, while in “Albert Camus and la peste brune,” he considers the French writer’s sketches of “isolation camps.” Along the way, Zaretsky weaves in his experience volunteering at a nursing home during lockdown—when one patient calmly declares, “I’ve lived my life; I would like to die,” Zaretsky recalls the meditation of Marcus Aurelius, which claimed, “When the mind fails before the body, the latter is left rudderless. For this reason, it is for the helmsman to decide when the moment has come to dock.” Though the placement of many anecdotes feels random and the pacing is rather inconsistent, Zaretsky’s considerations nonetheless tend to be insightful. Literary-minded readers will find much to consider. (Apr.)