The art of quarantines past
The coronavirus news cycle has finally come for me with a vengeance, so due to an avalanche of extremely urgent deadlines, I will be keeping this newsletter rather short for the next [some unknowable number] of weeks. But I will be sending it, because routines and commitments to the outside world are especially important right now.
This week I want to highlight a story from my hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, by Carolina A. Miranda, about the creation of the Florentine Codex. The Florentine Codex is an encyclopedia of the Aztec world, from its natural history to its religion to its politics, written in the generation or two after the conquest of Tenochtitlan by Spanish invaders. Although its official author is Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish priest, he worked closely with several Nahua scholars, and the manuscript itself is handwritten in both Spanish and Nahuatl. As Miranda writes, these men were actively interviewing people in their communities, and especially the elders who remembered the world as it had been before the Spanish arrived. The last volume of the Florentine Codex is an Indigenous account of the conquest itself. The whole codex is, quite simply, one of the most important historical documents ever written.
I knew all that, but I didn’t know that large pieces of the Florentine Codex—including its last volume, the one about the conquest—were produced while its authors were quarantined in Sahagún’s convent school as a smallpox epidemic tore through Mexico City. It was one in a long line of epidemics caused by European microbes. Imagine being sequestered and tasked with writing an encyclopedia of your culture as you know it is disappearing just beyond the walls of your quarantine prison. It’s like something out of science fiction, like so many moments from the conquest of Mexico.
I know we don’t need any more #quarantinegoals right now. Shakespeare, Newton, blah blah, whatever. As I said last week, aim as low as you need to in order to keep going. Productivity is not the goal. Sanity is. But just as feeling connected to each other in this time of social distancing is really important, feeling connected to the people of quarantines past can also help, I think. We are not the first ones to have locked ourselves away, knowing we will emerge into a different world on the other side. Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Pedro de San Buenaventura, Martín Jacobita, Diego de Grado, Bonifacio Maximiliano, and Mateo Severino did it too, in Sahagún’s school. They wrote something beautiful and lasting in the face of incredible destruction and change. I’m thinking of them as I try to do my own work, hoping it will be even a tiny fraction as meaningful as theirs.