In Ibn Battuta’s story, even the powerful went barefoot in a statement of equality, and all the people came together in prayer regardless of their religious background. Of course, whether this mass gathering really slowed the spread of the plague in Damascus is unclear—but we see in this account that crisis does not always bring out the cruelty within us. It can also push us toward sharing our pains and hopes and prayers, and treating each other as equally human. And when we respond that way, perhaps the affliction is lightened. While it is human nature to blame and demonize others in miserable times, it is also human nature to walk together, the leaders as barefoot as the followers.

The residents of Damascus left us a model for how to live in this precedented now. As the poet Robert Frost put it, “The only way out is through.” And the only good way through is together. Even when circumstances separate us—in fact, especially when they do—the way through is together.

I am highly suspicious of attempts to brightside human suffering, especially suffering that—as in the case of almost all infectious diseases—is unjustly distributed. I’m not here to criticize other people’s hope, but personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about the silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith called “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” The poem begins, “all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.” As in Ibn Battuta’s Damascus, the only path forward is true solidarity—not only in hope, but also in lamentation.

My daughter recently observed that when it’s winter, you think it will never again be warm, and when it’s summer, you think it will never again be cold. But the seasons go on changing anyway, and nothing that we know of is forever—not even this.

Plague is a one-star phenomenon, of course, but our response to it need not be.

WINTRY MIX

THERE’S A KAVEH AKBAR POEM that begins, “it’s been January for months in both directions,” and it really has been. I can remember in the abstract how it feels to wear a T-shirt, to feel sweat dripping down the bridge of my nose as I pull weeds in the garden. But I cannot bring to mind the actual feeling of sun on my skin now, as I pull up the withered pepper and tomato plants, trying to keep my back to the lip-cracking wind. I should’ve done this months ago, when the temperatures were milder and the plants equally dead. But I put everything off, even the purported leisure of gardening.

For quite a while here in Indianapolis, the only answer to “Why is the sky blue?” has been that it isn’t blue. I keep thinking about a line from a Mountain Goats song, “The gray sky was vast and real cryptic above me.”

There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.” Wordsworth writes of wandering “lonely as a cloud.” In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, sometimes the clouds are curious, other times mean. Clouds separate us from the sun when we need shade, but they also separate us from the sun when we need light. They are, like the rest of us, quite context-dependent.