If an event is unspeakable, the general rule is that people can’t shut up about it. War, genocide, divine mystery, sexual taboo — all crowded subjects with libraries devoted to the hopeless inability of words to describe them. Covid is unspeakable another way. Nobody speaks about it.
No other catastrophe during my lifetime has generated such a stark contrast between the scope of its impact and the poverty of its discourse. There have been a few Covid books — a pseudo-comic novel here, an analysis of the epidemiology there — but they can’t be said to amount to even a conversation. No memorials will be established, no testimonials gathered. Its anniversaries, like the fifth, around the time you’re reading this, will be neither celebrated nor mourned.
Silence is typical in the aftermath of plague in every period. You can teach an entire course on First World War poets. Try finding a plague poet, even though the 1918–20 flu pandemic dissolved somewhere between...
Stephen Marche is an essayist and a novelist. He wrote The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future and On Writing and Failure, among other books.
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