A message about COVID19 from SoM
I was in my 3rd year of university when I first heard the name Francesco Petrarca. No doubt I had heard the name before, after all he mastered the Italian sonnet; the immortal bard's English variations were nothing but translations of Petrarca's work. So I am certain his name came up in some grade school class where we studied poetry for that one week out of the year. But his name had never stuck with me before.
But this time it did. It was the mid 90s, game consoles were all the rage, but about 90% of all games were either first person shooters or car racing. Neither interested me, I longed for the old Commodore and Vic 20 games I grew up with. The Internet was new, people started creating online games, always striving to push the barriers of graphical design and complexity; but all I wanted to do was play Lemonade Stand.
But alas, the game could not be found online. And so to play that game I had to recreate it myself. Which I did, between my classes in Computer Science, Philosophy and History I would work on recreating the game that I had such fond memories of.
It was in one such History class that Petrarca was mentioned. Only in passing and only for a moment, a quote of his appeared on the overhead projector (yeah, I'm that old). Petrarca had borrowed a book by Cicero from an acquaintance, and now (well not now, this would have been in the 1350s give or take a decade, but at the time of his writing the letter) 4 years after borrowing the book, Petrarca included a note to his friend explaining why it had taken 4 years to return it.
"Your Cicero has been in my possession for four years and more. There is good reason, though, for so long a delay; namely, the scarcity of copiest who understand such works. Books that by their nature are a little hard to understand are no longer multiplied, and have ceased to be generally intelligible, and so have sunk into utter neglect, and in the end have perished...."
Keep in mind this was a time before books could be scanned, emailed, photo copied or otherwise duplicated. If you wanted a copy of a book you had to write it out yourself, and this is what Petrarca was referring to. He goes on to explain the pains he took to make sure the book was copied exactly, letter for letter. And thus why it took 4 years.
That simple quote resonated with me. As Petrarca strove to create a copy of a book he loved so much, here I was some 650 years later, striving to create the game I once loved, in a world where such games were thrown by the wayside, to perish in antiquity and never be thought of again.
I immediately found my kin, and adopted his name as my own online.
Petrarca had his muse, a woman he only named as Laure. Later historians would (somewhat) agree that this was Laure de Noves. He first saw her at the first hour of the Good Friday mass on April 6th, 1327 and immediately fell in love. And 21 years later, on the same first hour of the same 6th day of the month of April, but in the year 1348, she died of the Plague as it swept through Northern Italy.
Now here we are, in the year 2020, 672 years after that great plague, and once again as Easter approaches, Northern Italy and the world as a whole is set upon by a global pandemic.
I am once again intrigued by the similarities.
I won't go into stats, or try to explain the current pandemic. A great resource that is always being updated with explanations can be found here: https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html
I would encourage everyone, where ever you are but especially if you are in a city currently being hit by COVID19 to stay home. If you are ill and have any issues breathing, definitely seek medical advice. The only magic that will help you is a medical doctor, don't rely on herbs, charms, or spells.
The next few weeks and even months will be difficult. But give the medical community, the support programs, and the governments around the world time to get things in order. To ramp up testing and treatment facilities. The truth is the virus is out there, it wasn't contained, and it has probably expanded too far to be contained now. But when programs get ramped up to tackle this, life can return to normal (more or less) and the infrastructure will exist to track and quickly exterminate any hot spots that pop up without having to shut down entire countries. But right now, we have to wait and let the professionals do their thing. Give them time.
In the meantime, stay home. Watch a movie, spend time with family, learn to play an instrument, clean your bedroom, water the plants, meditate, binge watch something on some streaming service, surf the web (I hear www.spellsofmagic.com is a cool place to hang out).... or maybe, read a book.
...This age of ours consequently has let fall, bit by bit, some of the richest and sweetest fruits that the tree of knowledge has yielded; has thrown away the results of the vigils and labours of the most illustrious men of genius, things of more value, I am almost tempted to say, than anything else in the whole world.