One of William Blake's Illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts
Does every ying require its yang? Last week I was glowing with optimism inspired by a musical concert. This week quite by accident, I found myself nagged by “night thoughts,” to use the gloom-and-doom term featured in the title of Edward Young’s famous poem of the mid-eighteenth-century, wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The poem is all about death, a topic the mind may naturally, though by no means necessarily unhealthily, turn to when one gets old. Young surely inspired Emily Dickinson’s great (and mercifully shorter) thanatological masterpiece “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”: Safe in their Alabaster Chambers/Untouched by Morning/And untouched by noon/Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, /Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone. If “rafter of satin” doesn’t creep you out, what would? Well, what might do so could be the brief introductory essay by Martin Malia, the great Soviet scholar, in The Black Book of Communism, in which he sadly, dispassionately, offers a comparative glance at the numbers of people murdered by Nazis for the crime of their race and the number murdered by Communists for the crime of their social class. In searching for a bibliographical reference, I inadvertently stumbled upon Malia’s enormous estimates of the hecatombs.
During the Covid pandemic the daily actuarial reports of which Defoe writes in his Journal of the Plague Year are now features of the nightly news. Certain publications have actually made printing history with their innovative “visuals”—charts and graphs conveying complex information in fine detail. Though still penny-ante when compared with the political murders of the last century, world-wide Covid mortality has been horrendous. In our country alone the deaths approach a million. But equally horrendous also are some other disturbing statistics. In a recent squib on the PBS New Hour the Covid announcement was supplemented by the news that drug overdose deaths in America last year topped 100,000, slightly exceeding the 95,000 “alcohol-related” ones. For a particular reason I shall come to later, it will be the alcohol ones I will be pondering most deeply in this post, but only after mentioning two other categories in which our nation is on the leadership board: vehicular deaths and gun deaths.
In recent years there have been about forty thousand traffic deaths and forty-five thousand “gun-related” deaths in the United States annually. The term “gun-related” may seem more oblique than necessary, as the “relationship” between the gun and the dead person is actually pretty clear. A projectile fired from the former has effected the death of the latter. With regard to highway carnage, we seem to have come to an unstated social consensus that it’s just awful, but whacha gonna do? There's a price to doing business. Some of the casuistry over gun deaths is perhaps animated by the fear that we might actually do something to stop them, but will perhaps feel less inclined to do so if we know that about half of all the gun-dead shot themselves quite intentionally, and that perhaps none of the children shot in their strollers were “the intended victim”.
As it happens, I was encountering these gloomy statistics on the Monday and Tuesday of last week while I was still on the high of the symphony concert that I wrote about in my last post. But blog day was followed immediately by chemotherapy day-–hardly an ordeal any more but still unpleasant enough and laden with intimations of pathology not improved by my recent contemplation of catalogues of macro-mortality. Illness can complicate your view of many subjects, including some, like narcotic addiction, on which I might have thought I had a firm and unassailable view. But if you are feeling really lousy and somebody gives you a pill that more or less instantly makes you feel really great, it may make you stop and ponder a moment. How many Opioid deaths begin in such apparently simple fashion?
Trying to read anything very serious while surceasing sorrow by medical infusion is a lost cause, so I often take a book of short stories to infusion. This time it was one of my two thick volumes of Mauppasant: inexhaustible, and many of the stories really short. Picking among them at random I found myself reading one called “The Baptism”.* This turned out to be a mistake. The story begins with an old navy doctor taking a drink of cognac with a friend or friends. He proposes a toast to “that charming poison…seductive murderer, and destroyer of people”—alcohol! He suggests they have probably read Zola’s recent L’Assommoir (1877)—one of the most terrifying of many fictional treatments of the social disaster of alcoholism—but have they ever seen, as he has, the effects of alcohol introduced by the French and the English on the native populations of their colonial territories? Or, he might have added, the laboring classes of their own native land? Because that is what his brief tale concerns. Years ago, he spent time over Christmas at an old family property in the countryside of the Breton coast. Living on the place was a peasant who with his wife and sister-in-law looked after things. The wife has a baby, and the proprietor was asked to stand as godfather. Oh, and also to front the parents money for the priest’s fee. On the day of the baptism the January weather is freezing, and the priest is late in arriving. Nonetheless, to the doctor’s horror the peasants insist on honoring their folk custom that the infant be kept stripped naked until the sacrament is performed. The priest, moving at the speed of a “sacred turtle” shows no concern for this dangerous barbarity, his concern being the extortion of another five francs from the godfather. The ceremony finally over, the parents and most of the baptismal party go off to a tavern to celebrate—meaning, for them, getting blind drunk. When the alcohol runs out, they drink lamp fuel. By next morning both babe and mother are dead. It is just that abrupt, Maybe I have read something more depressing. Possibly Eli Wiesel’s Night.
Why do the Breton fishermen drink themselves to death? Because, the narrator says, when drunk they no longer see the foam atop the storm-tossed waves, only the waves themselves. In a similar way the sweated textile workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution found that “gin is the quickest way out of Manchester.” There have been great medical advances in the use of chemotherapy, but I believe a basic paradoxical strategy remains: fighting fire with fire, the calculated administration of selected poisons. This must be a rather delicate business, and probably never wisely self-administered. For Maupassant’s peasants the pain of daily life must have been very great indeed. Yet certainly the coal-oil treatment was worse than the disease. We speak of combating cancer and battling Covid, but two hundred thousand annual deaths from the self-administration of supposed palliatives suggest some huge cosmic snafu. Death is a universal certainty and needs no extra help in performing its work. Our catalogues of mega-deaths recording the operations of disease and natural disasters need not be swollen further by the depravity and folly of our species.
*I later discovered that Maupassant has two very different stories, with very different tones, by the same name—“Le baptême”. The shocking tale I describe is his second, from 1885 . The first (1884) is tender and affirmative in its attitude to peasant life.
