Headmaster's Weekly Newsletter – Week 14

Dear KES Family:

When I taught English, I used to choose the literature we read according to a theme I wanted to study. One year, all the books, poems, short stories, and plays we studied were centered around the central theme of plagues. We started with the Old Testament and then moved on to some fabulous titles such as The Plague (Camus), Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe), Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez), and The Mask of the Red Death (Poe). For the last two years, I have been thinking about that course and wondered how it has prepared me for this pandemic. From time to time I wonder if the students who took my class have thought back and/or benefitted by everything we learned (as a matter of necessity there was a lot of science and epidemiology in the course too).

English teachers always hope that what they teach is relevant to life and, in the grand scheme of things, helpful.

One way of framing literature is through conflict: conflict with one’s own self, conflict with the people around you, conflict with nature, conflict with the state, conflict with God…the list is long. Like the current pandemic, plagues test the individual and society. All aspects of conflict present themselves and do so with relentless regularity. Plagues have the ability to make the world seem random and chaotic, and for individuals to feel powerless. As a result, literature about plagues tends to be very existential. Plagues create conditions which ask the big questions about the value of our lives, and the meaning and purpose of our existence. It is heavy stuff for the classroom, but I always felt that my students responded powerfully to the big questions being asked.

I have no doubt that the current pandemic is forcing all of us to think and feel in different ways about almost everything. We are all taking stock of what we value and what we believe, and, in many cases, we are being forced to make choices. We are also seeing how we differ from others and are constantly assessing how appreciative or resentful we feel as a result of other people’s actions and decisions. In a day and age when we are desperately trying to be more inclusive and to reconcile society’s past mistakes, the pandemic is creating conditions by which society in increasingly split and exclusionary and judgemental.

In Camus’ novel The Plague the central character is Dr. Rieux. He doesn’t have superpowers, and doesn’t fit any classic definition of a literary hero. In fact, he would reject any notion that he is heroic. And yet, he is a hero of mine. He looks after his patients. He suffers emotionally to see them in such distress, to see them die. When he reaches a point where his own humanity is interfering with his ability to help the citizens of Oran, he finds a way of hardening his heart so that he can carry on caring for them. In a hyperbolized way you could say he is a warrior, fighting a battle with death that he can never win, but that would romanticize the grim reality of his work.

I don’t want to romanticize the grim realities of life these days, but I sincerely hope that you and your loved ones find peace and love dominant forces in your lives this Christmas, and that a rejuvenating sense of hope comes to all of us in 2022.

Sincerely,

Joe Seagram