Bout of Books 28 - Day 2: Pale Rider

Yesterday, I wound up being busy with work for a lot of the day, and only got my usual morning reading done: about 40 pages of Spinney's Pale Rider about the 1918 influenza. Today, I read another 40 pages in the morning, and am now about 40 pages from the end. I wanted to keep reading, but had to work, so I didn't get to the chapter on the influence of Spanish flu on Europeans adopting national healthcare. For a brief moment, it seemed as if covid-19 would lead to real change in health care policy in the U.S., but now it seems like we are just going to pretend it's not happening as thousands of people die. It's a grim start to the readathon, sorry. Last fall, not knowing what it was about, I read Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, from which Spinney's book takes its name. That book captures the experience of delirium that has been common to the 1918 and 2020 pandemics, as this bit quoted in a recent piece on it in Texas Monthly shows

Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.

 
To make an abrupt transition to today's challenge, if you like Katherine Anne Porter, then maybe you would also like Virginia Woolf.