The Plague in the World Literature: Love and Death Threats |
Doomsday happens when God only takes back one of the human senses. While stopping a car at an intersection when the red light is on, a man suddenly loses his eyesight. His vision was not blocked by a dark wall like when he closed it, on the contrary it looked entirely white. As white as milk. He had to fight to contact his wife so he could go home safely with the help of others who then had the evil intention of stealing his car.
When seeing an ophthalmologist, he hopes to find an answer to a sudden illness. He hopes blindness is only temporary and miraculously healed as the disease came. But the doctor found nothing, medically his eyes were healthy. There was no answer, many of which were question after question when another patient experienced similar suffering, then paramedics, and finally dozens of people were hit by a blindness outbreak.
The government is isolating sufferers to avoid the spread of the epidemic, exactly as is done with patients exposed to Covid-19 today. They were quarantined in a place that was guarded by the military with complete weapons. Patients who tried to escape immediately shot dead. No one is allowed to go out to localize a pandemic, but patients are increasing every day until the whole city, all citizens and government officials, are infected.
The plague brought down the government. Life without order because every human being tries to maintain cannibal life. They sacrifice the lives of others to maintain their own lives, even for the sake of fighting over a piece of food. Hell comes after blindness strikes.
That is how José Saramago described the gripping chaos in Blindness (the original title of the Ensario Sobre A Cegueira). Chaos and bloodshed can occur only for a piece of food, and people instinctively form colonies to strengthen self-defense. José not only described the details, but stabbed into the soul so that anxiety as endless and increasingly felt real in the current situation, when all the nations of the world are helpless against Coronavirus Disease-2019 or Covid-19.
Lockdown cities such as Wuhan in China and countries like Italy and Spain, described Albert Camus by touching in the La Peste. People are trapped in endless anxiety. Those who have already entered cannot get out and people outside cannot enter.
The problem becomes more complicated because the sophistication of information technology is not as it is now so that people cannot find out the real condition quickly and accurately.
In fact, fast and accurate information is needed to avoid the situation worsening, although it must be recognized when all humans can produce information through devices and social media, the task of sorting and selecting diamonds in the middle of the ocean of information becomes heavier.
Love and death threats
That worrying situation is seen now all over the world. Plague is not just a health problem. When it hits a country and then spread rapidly throughout the world, it becomes a complex crisis because it touches on social, cultural, economic, defense and security aspects, even self-esteem and love.
Who cares about love amid the threat of hundreds of deaths every day?
Does anyone still care about feelings in the chaos of the order of life? Like war, plague cannot kill longing, affection, and love. The depth of taste even thrives in difficult situations, between life and death bets. This is not just a battle between logic and taste—the brain and the heart—but the determination to save the majesty of love that is even more fertile amid the scent of death.
At least that's how Florentino Ariza's struggle for 53 years and seven months and 11 days to get his true love. Since seeing Fermina Daza as a child, she has not stopped trying to capture Fermina's attention despite several times getting rejected. After falling from one woman's arms to another woman's arms, Florentino could not forget his true love.
When the chance to win Fermina's heart came, they were no longer young and the world was suffering from anxiety because of the cholera epidemic. The fire of love must face the test of time as well as the plague that struck. That is how Gabriel García Márquez stirred feelings in Love in the Time of Cholera so thrilling.
