Victories Never Last
Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
A timely and nuanced book that sets the author’s experience as a nursing home volunteer during the pandemic alongside the wisdom of great thinkers who confronted their own plagues.
In any time of disruption or grief, many of us seek guidance in the work of great writers who endured similar circumstances. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, historian and biographer Robert Zaretsky did the same while also working as a volunteer in a nursing home in south Texas. In Victories Never Last Zaretsky weaves his reflections on the pandemic siege of his nursing home with the testimony of six writers on their own times of plague: Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, and Albert Camus, whose novel The Plague provides the title of this book.
Zaretsky delves into these writers to uncover lessons that can provide deeper insight into our pandemic era. At the same time, he goes beyond the literature to invoke his own experience of the tragedy that enveloped his Texas nursing home, one which first took the form of chronic loneliness and then, inevitably, the deaths of many residents whom we come to know through Zaretsky’s stories. In doing so, Zaretsky shows the power of great literature to connect directly to one’s own life in a different moment and time.
For all of us still struggling to comprehend this pandemic and its toll, Zaretsky serves as a thoughtful and down-to-earth guide to the many ways we can come to know and make peace with human suffering.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zaretsky (The Subversive Simone Weil), a modern and classical languages professor at the University of Houston, examines in this searching if uneven collection how writers have weathered both physical and ideological plagues. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Zaretsky turned to familiar texts to make sense of things: "voices that were once familiar and comforting now struck me as edgy and tinged with urgency," he writes. In "Daniel Defoe and the Great Plague of London," he muses on the Quarantine Act of 1721, which said that those who attempted to escape quarantine could be sentenced to death, while in "Albert Camus and la peste brune," he considers the French writer's sketches of "isolation camps." Along the way, Zaretsky weaves in his experience volunteering at a nursing home during lockdown—when one patient calmly declares, "I've lived my life; I would like to die," Zaretsky recalls the meditation of Marcus Aurelius, which claimed, "When the mind fails before the body, the latter is left rudderless. For this reason, it is for the helmsman to decide when the moment has come to dock." Though the placement of many anecdotes feels random and the pacing is rather inconsistent, Zaretsky's considerations nonetheless tend to be insightful. Literary-minded readers will find much to consider.
