A Journal of the Plague Year (2)

What’s so cool about rereading A Journal of the Plague Year during the COVID-19 crisis is how little humanity has changed in 3 centuries.

“...it was a most surprizing thing to see those streets which were usually so thronged now grown desolate, and so few people to be seen in them, that if I had been a stranger and at a loss for my way, I might sometimes have gone the length of a whole street ... and seen nobody to direct me ...”

Not to mention the kind of discussion that happened at the same time as the plague: what people saw or thought they saw, read or thought they read, the visions and the signs that they talked about.

“I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.”