Thread by @_IanBoyden

🧵 I am heart-broken this morning. The fatalism surrounding Covid is fracturing our societies, our communities, even the bonds of our friends and families. As my wife and daughter went back to school in person today, it struck home.

I keep returning to this sentence by Camus:

“The only means of fighting a plague is humane respect.”

More and more, I have come to believe Camus’ observation. It will not be through science alone, nor through one form of government or another, one policy or another. The vaccines are important, mandates are important, but not all. What does Camus mean in this sentence?

In January of 2020, I spent some time thinking about how to translate “le respect humain.” Ultimately settling on the phrase “humane respect.” Here’s a thread with @degewa and @DanHongTang about that translation.

https://twitter.com/_IanBoyden/status/1222730161092587520

And @degewa and I discussed this at greater length in a conversation published in @chinaheritage, which also includes my translation of “Epidemic Three-line Poems,” the first of two forty-poem cycles Woeser has written about the pandemic.
chinaheritage.net/journal/poems-…

What constitutes humane respect? As the pandemic rolls on longer than I ever imagined it would, my thoughts on this term have evolved. My answer today is that humane respect is best understood as a form of compassion.

This compassion is defined in part by listening, actively listening to the conditions of this world, the suffering, actively listening so that we can be clear about cause and effect. This type of listening is a form of embrace.

We might not be able to physically embrace those we love right now. Let us at least embrace through listening. Listening counters fracturing.

Consider revising Camus’ sentence: An essential component of combating a plague is Listening.

If a family member talks about their concerns, talks about best practices for keeping each other safe, even if you think you have heard it all before, take time to listen to them. They are saying this out of love. Hold and maintain that love by listening.

This is not time for denialism, marginalization, or diminishing. Err on the side of caution and vigilance. Do not fracture the love closest to you. That love is what holds you together.

And this is another facet of humane respect: Attention. The only way to combat a plague is Attention. But not any kind of attention. Camus prefaces this sentence by saying, “There is no question of heroism in all of this.”

By heroism, I think Camus means will and pride—that tyrannical “I” that makes such a mess of things. So we must listen with such attention that the “I” disappears. Perhaps that type of listening is a form of prayer that allows us to see clearly.

Simone Weil wrote: “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

And perhaps we can understand humane respect as “Listening with absolutely unmixed attention”

The only way to combat this plague is by listening with absolutely unmixed attention.