Dr. Albrecht Classen
University Distinguished Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, University of Arizona
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
How do we respond to a crisis, a catastrophe, a disaster, a crime, major suffering, sickness, death, or a war? There are many different approaches, and humankind had to handle many of them and more throughout time. Already at the end of antiquity, the philosopher Boethius formulated profound ideas about such a situation and how to turn it around to make the best out of it, even under the worst circumstances. In his De consolatione philosophiae (ca. 524), Boethius finds himself stuck in prison on trumped-up charges of state treason. He knows that those are all false, but he also knows that he will certainly be killed because he faces evil forces out there targeting him for many reasons, none of which are good or justified. In that situation, Boethius is about to despond, when Philosophy, an allegorical figure, arrives and begins to teach him, her lifelong student, once again about how to find the way to true happiness.
First, she illustrates to him that Fortune is a universal force that cannot be influenced in its constant rotations. It comes and goes, and her instability is her inherent property. Hence, no one can or should rely on it in the quest for true happiness. In fact, misfortune proves to be actually good for the individual because it reveals truth and relativizes all those things that commonly seem to make us feel happy (honor, money, power, family, sex, leisure, food, etc.).
True happiness, by contrast, rests in the Supreme Good, or God, because it is determined by complete self-sufficiency, power, independence, unity, or harmony. This could be a religious or a philosophical entity. We, as human beings, can never hope to achieve complete self-sufficiency, but we can and must strive toward that goal. This is, actually, our natural instinct, like the desire in any plant or animal to be the best what its potential promises it. Total self-fulfillment is never possible, but the way toward that goal already provides us with the fundamental sense of happiness.
All material forms of happiness are temporary, fleeting, void of stability, and easily disappear, leaving us frustrated, exhausted, empty, like an alcoholic who has to return to the bottle to regain the short-term sense of illusionary happiness, or the addict, who needs his/her drugs. True happiness rests in the divine, however we might want to define it, but, as we learn from Boethius, the terms of self-sufficiency, unity, and harmony, for instance, well circumscribe what this all means.
These brief comments contribute profoundly to a meaningful response to COVID-19 because most of us, if not all human beings, are subject to nature’s forces, including the workings of viruses. In fact, there are over 380 trillion viruses inhabiting us, some of which are highly toxic and dangerous, most of which, however, are not. We survive in this dangerous world because our body is a chemical factory, so to speak, and there are enough antibodies and countless operations going on inside of us to manage those huge numbers quite successfully.
The crisis we find ourselves in right now has had a huge impact on virtually every human being on the face of this world. The responses to it have been equally multi-fold. Boethius’s teachings, however, prove to be most meaningful and ought to be considered much more widely to help people see through their own blindness in the vain quest to secure temporary, material, or physical happiness. Much depends on our perception, or sensitivity, or our inside responses to the outside events, that is, our willingness or ability to transcend the physical barriers between ourselves and the natural world we are part of.
Here I am not concerned with medical, political, economic, or other pragmatic issues. My concern is focused on how to make the best out of our time while we live. The pandemic has caused a huge pause for everyone, and the question thus arises how to fill this empty time, or how to make something meaningful out of the sudden vacuum we find ourselves in. My wife and have realized, for instance, that it was high time to meet our neighbors, get to know their small children, and to establish a good relationship. Before, we had always been so busy, leaving quickly in the morning for work, returning late in the evening, never having a quiet moment to go over, say hi, inquire about their well-being. Now, we suddenly know the names of each other, greet each other, chat, and feel no longer so isolated. We are neighbors, in the best sense of the word.
Oddly, COVID-19 really broke out or spread globally at a meaningful time, in Spring of 2020. I live in Tucson, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, and the months of April and March are the best time of the year, with mild temperatures, with the cacti, acacias, mesquites, wildflowers, bushes, and many different trees bursting forth with flowers. My own response to the crisis was to start a campaign writing haikus every day and posting them on Facebook. Soon enough, I began to take pictures and discovered the real beauty of our environment, once again. Those I also shared online, and could thus reach hundreds of my ‘friends’ worldwide who obviously enjoyed either the brief poems or the photos, or both together. The crisis has opened a creative vein in me that I deeply cherish and will not allow to go dry up again. I have written thousands of poems already during my life, most of them in my native German, but now I realized that my second language, English, is equally available to me to allow my creativity to come forth. My scholarly writing is mostly in English, but only now do I recognize how much the poet in me also wants to speak in my adopted language.
Boethius would have agreed with me; this misfortunate situation with the crisis has actually turned into a very positive condition in which I have begun to transform my ordinary environment into a beautiful garden where even the most banal objects, plants, animals, or birds have become gems that now decorate my mind, my heart, my soul. How many times have I recently photographed nothing but a bush of grass growing next to a street; nothing distinctive, so it might seem, but now, seen through the lens of my camera, a true beauty queen, with fragile but flexible branches and stems, softly waving in the wind. So many thorny cacti have welcomed me surreptitiously, exposing their early petals without even asking me once. But I have also photographed badly damaged Saguaro cacti, with their inner ribs being deeply wounded, also a reminder of the ebb and flow of life, and this here in the semi-arid desert as well.
Writing haikus has proven to be a miraculous process, bringing together surprising elements in a strict verbal network of 5-7-5 syllabi. The less one says, so it seems, the more one might be able to say. The verbose, overly eloquent expressions cram and plug the ears and eyes, while the finely tuned words are the elegant notes on my heart’s strings. There is, in short, music in the world, and in the wake of the crisis, this music has begun to sing a little more audibly. I can only hope that many people will listen to it and/or chime into the singing because we are all part of a cosmic harmony. Oddly, even the ‘evil’ viruses belong to this; they are not evil as such, they just do what they do, with no moral impetus. There are so many new observations, so many fantastic insights, and so many epiphanies. The next haiku is already waiting to come out of me.
Albrecht Classen, April 30, 2020
Dr. Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of German Studies at the University of Arizona. He has published more than 105 scholarly books and more than 730 articles on German and European literature and culture. He is the editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities Open Access. He studied at the universities of Marburg, Erlangen (Germany), Millersville, PA (USA), Oxford (Great Britain), Salamanca (Spain), Urbino (Italy), and Charlottesville, VA (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986. He has a broad range of research interests covering the history of medieval and early modern German and European literature and culture from about 800 to 1800, but he is also involved in contemporary literature, writing poetry and prose. In 2004, the German government bestowed its highest civilian award upon him, the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Band. In 2017, he received the rank of Grand Commander of the Most Noble Order of Three Lions by the Duke of Swabia. He has served four times as President of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. He also served as President of the Arizona Chapter of the American Association of Teaching of German from 1993 to 2019. Since 2020, he is the President of the Society of Contemporary American Writers in German. He has also published 9 poetry volumes of his own and two volumes of his satires (2018 and 2020).