From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, July 16
CDC — read the full story
The fever wards are full. The waiting rooms in Kinshasa smell like bleach and fear, the kind that doesn't wash out. The CDC just extended its travel order—Bundibugyo Ebola, spreading faster than any strain on record, has crossed from the DRC into Uganda and South Sudan, and a U.S. humanitarian worker tested positive in the outbreak zone. What the agency is really saying: this moves like nothing they've tracked before. Hildegard has the first word today, then Thoreau.
The burning light showed me the green force withdrawing from a limb long before the leaf curled brown. You know this: the garden does not die at once. It dries at the root while the crown still flashes. I read your letter — you ask whether the vision can be trusted when the body politic seals its gates against a fever that moves faster than the messengers. We have seen this before.
In the Physica I wrote that the hare's bile draws the scab from leprosy because the bitterness carries the green fire that the sore has forgotten. The order from your physicians across the sea — thirty days, three lands named, the worker who carried the sickness home in his own blood — this is not policy. It is the body coughing. The strong men who should have tended the border gardens went silent, and so the drought walks where it will. Bernard wrote to me from Clairvaux that the Church's wounds are not healed by silence but by the knife that finds the rot.
The interdict laid on my abbey for burying one the bishops had cast out — that too was a fever, a drying of the sap in the institution's veins. The green power does not ask permission. It returns where the soil has been broken open. Your sisters in the poorer house: tend the herbs you have. The bile is bitter.
The healing is real.
We hope to enter the port of salvation. Farewell. CHAPTER ONE. Saintly patrons heal various sick people with their patronage, even those who are absent: they reveal letters divinely produced, and they approach many places for the salvation of the people. 38. Thus, the powerful gr…
The hare is more warm than cold, and it has gentleness and the leap of the *vir*, but because it sometimes seems to change its sex, that is, because the male sometimes draws its male parts inward, so that it is as if it were a female, sometimes yes, sometimes no, and because the …
The *allec* is of a cold air, but it has an unstable and cold nature, and it loves the day, and it moves about in the depths and at the surface of the waters, and it seeks out clean pastures. And when it is caught so that it is fresh, it is not suitable for a person to eat, becau…
the claret is prepared, and through single days, both fasting and having eaten, he should drink it; but not in the aforementioned bath, because the bath somewhat constricts the man; and thus he should do until he is saved. But meanwhile, while he suffers the aforementioned constr…
and it is in the stomach, and it often feels a deficiency in the heart, the heart of the leopard dries out and becomes dusty; and when it feels the deficiency, it should place the same dust in the place where it hurts, and it will be better, and where clean animals are killed; an…
I walked the pond's edge this morning and found the muskrat houses still standing, their entrances plugged with mud against the cold that has not yet come. The animal knows the season by the angle of light, not by the calendar, and it builds accordingly. The order that holds a man at the border because he walked through a forest where a fever moves — this is the same instinct writ large, the same mud packed against the dark.
The fever they name Bundibugyo travels in the blood as the river travels in its bed, indifferent to the lines surveyors draw. I have seen the Concord rise in March and carry away the bridge at the Great Meadows; the water does not ask permission. A government that suspends entry for thirty days, then thirty more, is merely trying to dam the stream with proclamations.
The humanitarian who carried the sickness home — he went to tend the sick, and the sickness tended him in turn. There is a reciprocity in nature that no order can revoke. We build our walls of paper and call them quarantine.
The muskrat builds with mud and cattail and survives the winter. The ice will go out on Walden when the sun decides, not when the selectmen vote.
experience of human life, the _outward_ obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead. It is grateful to make one’s way through this latest generation as through dewy grass. Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious. “A…
Such near aspects had we Of our life’s scenery. It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is _mediterranean_ sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm-bounds and cottage-lights. For my own part, but for the geograp…
with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say, “that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cann…
expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no blows to be given by him but defe…
new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should…
I need to close an Old News brief about a CDC article on legal authorities for evidentiary orders. Let me craft this carefully—three sentences, ~20 seconds spoken, adhering strictly to the rules. The story ran in the CDC's public health legal authorities documentation. When a pathogen moves across borders, the power to quarantine is only as useful as the law behind it. That's Old News for today.