The worn trope—Time Devours All Things (tempus edax rerum)—is true for human beings, says Shakespeare: if you’re a mortal, death lurks at the heart of the very thing you most want. During a plague, or a pandemic, it’s wanting that endangers us.
Rather than write about death and the world unfolding in the throes of the Black Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio instead wrote about the utopian potential of storytelling.
For Plutarch, life and the course of history insist that we face up to who we are and this is as harrowing as it is liberating; it is the source of our destruction as much as it is the springboard for our accomplishments.
