Once Lost Always Lost?

 Well, it's finally happened. After four and a half years of a global pandemic, I've just had my first positive COVID test. As soon as I poured in the sample dropper, the "test" line turned red. I sat there patiently for fifteen minutes hoping it would go away. But it did not... Oh well; it could be worse. So far, it's been a fairly mild case. Two days in and with a waning fever, I'm probably already past the worst of it. I've been vaccinated and boosted twice or thricely. So the odds are in my favor that this will not be an especially severe illness. 

The worst of it, then, is not so much the symptoms—but simply the fact of having gotten infected. I have had to part with a certain foolish pride. There was some part of me that liked the sense that I had lasted all this time without succumbing. I knew rationally, of course, that my lack of infection did not mean I was smarter or more careful than other people. There is an incurable element of randomness to this and every pandemic. But, secretly, I still felt a certain snooty self-complacency in having made it through the whole crisis COVID-free. 

Now, I will have to resign my membership in the exclusive club of the never-infected. I will no longer be able to hold my head up among friends who have managed to avoid the virus by taking extra precautions. It's a bit like the nineteenth century obsession with virginity. I feel in some ways that I am a fallen man. I have been disgraced and violated. Some innocence or purity I once had has been taken from me. And now, like the ruined women of the Victorian age, I will be subject to the ostracization of my still-inviolate friends. 

As Gretchen's friends taunt a fallen comrade in Goethe's Faust: "the upshot is, the flower's plucked!" (Atkins trans.) Later on in the play, when Gretchen finds herself subject to the same cruel fate, she laments that she had not had more compassion before on friends who had succumbed. So it is with me. I once sauntered with the mask-wearing, hand-washing, COVID-free ones, feeling righteous in my purity, and scorning those who had not taken the same precautions. And now, karma being what it is, I find myself in the same position as them. 

But since I am in the role of a deflowered Victorian maiden, I can turn for comfort to the gentle humanity of Thomas Hardy, who sympathized with their plight and rejected the callous double standard of his society. Whenever I've had a similar scare about COVID, I have thought back to this passage, from Tess of the d'Urbervilles. And now that what I long feared has come to pass, it came to mind again: "Was once lost always lost really true[?...] The recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone."

So it must be with COVID too. I have not actually lost anything—apart from a ridiculous form of pride that deserved to be humbled. And I can trust still to the "recuperative power of organic nature" to see me through. As we all will have to do—no matter how long this disease is among us.