Lesson’s from Boccaccio’s the Decameron

When I came to America at the age of 17, I could read a bit of English, but could not speak much of it. 

Since I was a budding intellectual of sorts in my native language of Farsi, memorizing Rumi and Hafiz poetry as a child, I decided to compromise by going to engineering school, since I could speak the universal language of mathematics, and secure a list of the top hundred books of Western culture, hoping that by reading them on my own, it would make me an intellectual! 

From the Bible to Bhagavad Gita, War and Peace to Ulysses, I tried to read them all but understood very little. Bocaccio's 14th century prose work the “Decameron" was a book on that list, wherein "the plague prompts ten well-born young Florentines to seek refuge in the country, where they spend ten of the next fourteen days telling each other stories - ten tales each day for a total of hundred."

Part morbid and part intellectual eroticism, I kept thinking our own Scheherazad’s “One Thousand and One Nights" has 10X more stories and is a lot more interesting, but hey, it was on the list, so I read it. 

Fast forward 46 years, and now we are going through our own pandemic experience, and the importance of reading the Classics in general and Bocaccio’s tales of redemption becomes self evident, reminding us that the plague eventually ends, and civilization survives and moves forward.

When a nation is divided, forcing us to gravitate too far to the left or right, entrenching us in our positions and allowing our opinions to congeal, we get hit hard somehow or somewhere like Pearl Harbor, experience a 9/11, or watch a virus paralyze our economy. Then all of a sudden we remember we are Americans first, and Republicans or Democrats next. A common enemy can align us the way a magnet can perfectly align a handful of metal shavings along the north and south poles. 

If you have time on your hand, look for an old copy of the Decameron on your bookshelf. Otherwise read this week’s featured article below and see if it helps get you through The Time of Coronavirus a bit easier.