On living in the age of coronavirus

This morning a colleague sent me this short post from the Gospel Coalition: “CS Lewis on the coronavirus.” It’s an excerpt from Lewis’s great essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” which he wrote shortly after the shocking end of World War II in answer to the question “How are we to live in an atomic age?” As the poster there writes, “[j]ust replace ‘atomic bomb’ with ‘coronavirus’” and Lewis’s message moves from being of historical interest to strikingly relevant. Then, timelessness was a hallmark of his thought.

In answer to the question, Lewis writes that:

“I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’”

As Ellis, the crippled former lawman who counsels Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men, might put it: “What you got ain’t nothing new.”

Lewis continues:

[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.

Lewis here confronts one of the basic facts of human life—that it will end. Modern people, heirs to the scientistic optimisms of the Enlightenment and the Progressive Era, many of whom honestly believe we can abolish death through science, are particularly prone to avoid even thinking about this fact, with dire results. As it happens, I’ve meditated on this here recently.

Having forced ourselves to look this fact in the eye, what then? How should we live under these circumstances?

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

Lewis notes, poignantly for us at this time, that while atomic bombs “may break our bodies” even “a microbe can do that.” Nevertheless, these things “need not dominate our minds.”

All this comes from the introduction to the essay, and Lewis goes on to lay out his positive vision for responding to the threat of the atomic bomb—or, for us, pandemic—at great and winsome length in the rest of the essay. The whole thing is worth reading. “On Living in an Atomic Age” is collected in Present Concerns, a wonderful collection of topical pieces Lewis wrote for newspapers and magazines between the beginning of World War II and the late 1950s.

You can also listen to the entire essay as read by Ralph Cosham via the wonderful CSLewisDoodle channel on YouTube. I’ve embedded the video in this post. It’s worth your time.

In the meantime, whether still at work from day to day, on a mandated leave of absence from work or school, self-quarantined just in case, or—God forbid—sick, let these days “find us doing sensible and human things.” (Here’s one version of that that I’ve recently written about.) And, quite sensibly, we can always start with reflection.