Musings - on the editor's mind

“Love in the time of the Cholera” is a book famous in part because of its title. The 1985 novel by the Columbian Gabriel García Márquez traces the complex journey of a couple from their youthful marriage through a lifetime of lovers, beyond any one cholera epidemic.

Cholera, a deadly infectious disease, is spread through contaminated water supplies.

Best if we recognize laughter in the time of the coronavirus now, in the present moment. Even in this worst hard time, to echo the title of Tim Egan’s 2006 award winning history of the Great Plains Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, there is beauty and joy and, yes, laughter to be found and to create.

Four billion years ago the Earth was void, without form. Today there are daffodils and tulips, butterflies and dragonflies. Amazing and, yes, a miracle of natural forces and evolution. We are natural forces. We are evolving. We shape this present moment and create our futures.

“Think you can, think you can’t,” Henry Ford might have said. “Either way, you will be right.”

In this worst hard time, in the aftermath of personal and collective Hurricane Katrinas here and worldwide, flowers are blooming, birds are singing, bees are pollinating, farmers are planting. The sky is blue today or there may be a storm tomorrow. Both are necessary.

“There is more day left to dawn. The sun is but a morning star,” Thoreau wrote, his last lines in “Conclusion,” the chapter ending “Walden.”

Even in our worst hard time, even as Jews and Egyptians alike faced plagues and forced marches, there was time for worship, for contemplation and hope.

Cry as you must. Beat on the bed and bawl. Exhaust yourself. But at some point sleep. Refresh yourself also by looking up at our morning star. Listen. Birds are singing, as they have been for tens of thousands of years.