Staving Off Death With Stories

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, September 01, 2005
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It's one of the pitfalls of a liberal arts education. Watching coverage of the disastrous events along the Gulf Coast, with all its echoes of the recent tsusami is Asia -- apart from the advanced warning and the endless miles of traffic that jammed the freeways in advance -- all I can think of is the introduction to Boccaccio's Decameron. The Black Death has reached Florence -- the year is 1348 -- and, after recounting in unforgettable detail the course and symptoms of the plague, Boccaccio tells the story of a group of young people who retreat to the countryside and spend their days entertaining one another with stories as they shelter from the death all around them. They are affluent, of course, with access to rural estates and servants to wait on them, but they are refugees nonetheless. In the hands of someone like Edgar Allan Poe, such an anecdote becomes "The Masque of the Red Death," a morality tale about the rich getting theirs. But Boccaccio, having witnessed the epic tragedy firsthand and having been marked by it, sees that those who flee are as much to be pitied as those who stay. They are witnesses, even if their stories are a kind of denial.

There is more horror than denial in the survivor stories we are hearing. The plight of those who retreated from Katrina -- displaced and dispossessed, thrown on the mercy of Providence -- is lamentable; the plight of those who did not or could not run is even worse.

I've never had much use for the personification of cities. O Jerusalem. Babylon, Babylon. People I can relate to, not municipalities. But tragedy has a way of changing that. Just as, for me, New York was never a place with sentimental attachments -- an abstraction, a value -- before September 11, New Orleans never was until now -- a place where destructions are prophesied and oracles pronounced. How strange to feel, to really feel, not just for people but for a plot of ground. But I do.

Boccaccio, of course, wrote more than a book; The Decameron invented a form, one that was readily adopted by Geoffrey Chaucer to kick-start English literature. Chaucer's story tellers were pilgrims, not refugees. Instead of fleeing Florence, they sought Canterbury. But what's the difference, really, between pilgrims and refugees? They are both driven by fear toward hope, two sides of the same metaphor for life.

Donate.
You can give to The Red Cross or the charity of your choice. PCA members can find more information on the denominations relief efforts at the PCA's Mission to North America. If you're in Houston, my church -- Christ the King PCA -- has compiled a list of opportunities both to volunteer and to give.