By H. Zeiler

Even though the school year is starting to come to a close, do not be too sad. There are so many more great things to read in your off time.

What better thing to read during a great worldwide pandemic than Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” This is a short story about a prince, Prince Prospero, who is so prosperous that he decides to throw a great costume party during a plague called the Red Death. Even though everyone is getting sick and dying, he believes that he can just put up a wall around the castle and just party with all of his rich friends (sound familiar?). As the reader proceeds from one room to the next, each one more progressively darker and scarier, the story ends with a … you know I wasn’t going to spoil the ending for you.

The greatest aspects of this short story is the writing, it is Poe after all, and the significance of the metaphors that are presented in each of the rooms. There are so many parallels between this short story, written to scare people in the early nineteenth century, and today that it is like Mr. Poe had a time machine. Enjoy!

Now a short story is great, but you have an entire summer put to good use by reading. May I also recommend a novel by Albert Camus, called well, The Plague. Camus wrote this in French, so the title of the book is actually, La Peste, and a pest it is. The idea behind this work, as all of Camus’s other works, is to make an existential point about the nature of mankind during a pandemic.

If I haven’t lost you yet, this idea totally makes sense. The novel shows how powerless people are in the face of a large crisis. That seems to be exactly what people all around the world are feeling right now. There really isn’t anything that we as individuals can do. As in some of his other novels this is full of Camus’s use of absurdism and a healthy dose of witty sarcasm.

If these works are just too recent and you feel the need to go back and look at literature from a more civilized day, consider this. Decameron, by Boccaccio, is a book written in the Middle Ages about a group of young people, who shelter in place to avoid an epidemic. The stories collected here are full of love, practical jokes, and basically just life. It is another example of the nature of people during a stressful time.

What is interesting to take away from any of these three works is that for over six hundred years, people are just the same. The nature of humanity is such that when times get tough, many find the goodness to help others. It is that lesson that I hope can find all of you during these summer months.