Do I wake or sleep?

I bought a couple of books last week at Borders--The Fashionista Files (I met one of the co-authors of that on a shoot last fall) and The Great Mortality. I've been reading the latter--it's about the Black Death, the pandemic that wiped out one third to one half of the European population in the 1340s. I've always been fascinated by that disaster--its scope was so massive that it left a huge scar on the West. Its impact is felt even now--for instance, people whose ancestors survived the Black Death carry a genetic immunity to AIDS as well. It also helped usher in the Renaissance through a variety of ways (the relatively high rate of death among the peasantry led to the rise of the middle class because the few that were left were in a better position to negotiate wages, conditions, etc.; also the Black Death weakened people's faith in the church which eventually led to the Reformation). And excavation for London's underground has always been a dicey venture, as they must continually avoid the various plague pits. Think about that. This was 650 years ago. And this disaster is still...felt. Still reaching out to us.

I've been reading some reviews online. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, just a couple of chapters tracing the origins. It began in the Gobi Desert in the 1330s--another book I read said that the weather had changed, high winds were driving the rodents out of the desert toward settlements. This book places more of the blame on social conditions, specifically globalism and East-West traffic. Globalism was pretty nascent then, but it was just starting to perk up--the Genoese had established a colony in Caffa on the Black Sea, which was the plague's European entry point (the Genoese fled to Messina). It's fascinating to think of those beginnings--my director's imagination is seeing night in the medieval Mongolian desert, endless winds, a long panning shot across the sands, zooming in on a rat emerging from its whole, and scrabbling its way towards the lights of the settlement in the distance. Environmental factors were extremely important in the disaster--since the beginning of the century Europe had been undergoing the Little Ice Age, and because of that and very rainy summers, crops had failed time and time again. Most of the population was underfed. And a few rats carrying fleas that carried the Y. pestis bacteria--a bacteria, BTW, that targets rodents, humans are just collateral damage, how's that for irony?--nearly brought down Europe. "And people said and believed, 'This is the end of the world.'"

The book examines the human cost, the human picture of the Black Death. I think there's an academic tendency to talk about such disasters in the abstract--this many people died, this is the name of the bacillus, this is the route by which it was transmitted. But the Black Death is so compelling because the human cost is so easily imagined--the perfect storm of environmental factors, tradition and superstition masquerading as medicine, and a deeply religious mindset make the Black Death a pandemic of enormous impact. A lot of English villages were simply wiped out by the pestilence (the novel The Doomsday Book depicts this) and the forest reclaimed the land--these ghost villages lay undiscovered until air travel in the 20th century when aerial photography revealed the layout. Think about that. All that human effort to lay out the land, to plant crops and harvest them, and build churches and guildhalls and lay out streets--all of that, for naught. All that sweat and pain and emotion...faded. Gone. The worst environmental disaster ever just wiped it out, just eliminated those clusters of people. But there are still faint traces of those people--they are saying to us "We were here. We mattered. We were just like you--we had families and prayed and died in terror. We were here."

Those people were not so different from us.