![]() As Louise Cowan, the founder of the University of Dallas with her husband Don, used to say, yes reading great books makes you melancholy, and that’s why we do it together. Moreover, the great dead can be appreciated together. True, Nietzsche added, “or a philosopher,” who has the best of friends among the dead, but as he, living solitarily, came to suffer, and perhaps see, not for long. Only beasts and gods can live outside the city, solitary like Polyphemos, observes Aristotle. We should stay far away from each other, but can we bear to? Plague makes each of us the possible carrier of death to others, and all those others the possible bringers of death to us, and thus it, the measures it requires, and the panic it stirs, weaken the very communities we need to live, and to live well, as large as a country and as small as fellowships, of families, of parents and children, of man and wife, and of friends. ![]() ![]() No book shows how little we care to find out the truth, how little we know ourselves, how even less we know others, how rumor, prejudice, and illusion, rule our world as Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed.” Set in Lombardy in the 17th century, it covers the whole horror of a plague in whose deadly grip all suffered. ![]()
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