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| Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927. |
Compassionate community weaver David Brooks is getting unraveled over the pandemic: his usual faith in the non-political institutions seems to be getting lost ("Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too"):
In “The Decameron,” Giovanni Boccaccio writes about what happened during the plague that hit Florence in 1348: “Tedious were it to recount how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbors was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinfolk held aloof, and never met … nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate.”Tedious were it indeed, and Boccaccio doesn't in fact recount it, but follows ten young ladies and gentlemen characters to a country place safe from the disease, where they forget all about poor Florence once the "proem" to the book is over, and tell each other stories, which are certainly some of the best stories ever told, but don't tell you anything about what happened during the plague except that, as ever, wealthy people had enjoyable ways of getting away from it.
