January 2021.

     Following the presidential election, the vaccines to ward off the coronavirus became a reality and hopefulness flowered for a close to what, through executive inaction, ineptitude, and disingenuousness, had become a needlessly grave pandemic.  Despite this sign of better times to come, winter loomed and it promised to be brutal.

     A sequel to the coronavirus-black death editorial for The Richmond Times-Dispatch from the preceding April made sense.  There was also more grist for the mill.  During the warmer months of 2020, a habit had developed:  an hour or two each day on the front porch for reading by turns polemics and novels.  The summer reading list included Albert Camus’ The Plague (a rereading) and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.  The opinion I wrote exceeded the canonical length but the editor at the newspaper found the space to run it whole.  I’m thinking maybe a trilogy is in the offing as the vaccines take hold and the pandemic subsides, something focused more on social, economic, and cultural implications of pandemics, less about the diseases themselves.  We’ll see.

Here’s the editorial:

“A Coronavirus Winter:  Historical and Literary Lessons,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 18 January 2021, A13 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/david-routt-column-a-coronavirus-winter-historical-and-literary-lessons/article_f4f237e8-ad4a-5ef1-bf28-88bc669507c3.html).