Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Stories, a series of readings for the Weird Studies podcast.

Hello, Weird Studies listeners. This is Phil.

So I got up this morning and pulled my copy of William James writings 1902 to 1910, a wonderful Library of America volume of his collected works, pulled that off the shelf and was actually looking for a different essay. But en route to looking that one up, I found the essay on some mental

effects of the earthquake, which is an essay that I'd seen in the table of contents any number

of times, but never really thought to look at. I mean, I've never been through an earthquake.

I live in the Midwest, so surely the business of living through an earthquake is somewhat remote

for my day-to-day life.

But, of course, all of our day-to-day lives have been shaken up to some very large extent,

and it occurred to me that James' essay on the San Francisco earthquake might actually

be somewhat applicable to our present circumstances.

So I started reading it, and it's not a long essay, so it didn't take me very long to get to the end of it.

And it strikes me as very, very relevant to our present situation.

I mean, of course, earthquakes and pandemics are rather different.

Earthquakes are more localized, and the kind of response that each emergency calls for is rather different. But I'm hoping that as you listen to this, that you get something from it.

I think the main thing that James focuses on here is the power of courage and collective

action and the degree to which those qualities are elicited by times of great distress.

Now, I think one of the peculiar difficulties or challenges of the coronavirus epidemic is that we are not called upon to rush out into the street and help our brothers and sisters to pull objects from burning buildings to set up temporary emergency shelters.

It's not that kind of a disaster.

Instead, we are in the position of isolation and perennial watchfulness.

And as James points out, towards the end of this essay, it is much harder to be a watcher than it is to be a doer.

And perhaps that's one of the challenges of the coronavirus epidemic that we're going to have to learn how to live with in the coming days.

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