Life in a Charnel House

We live in a vast charnel house, a morgue, a knacker’s yard . . .  Dead people, dead animals, odd ends of decaying meat are just laying around, heaped up there, rotting here, a stray piece rolled into that corner.  Its easy to get sick.  A little cut can swell into a great putrid infection.  A little carelessness with your food, you can be puking for  a week.  Its easy to die.

If you want to thrive, you have wear masks at all times, have to be careful where you step, have to follow careful rituals, can’t afford to slack off.  You and your whole house.  You can’t do it by yourself.  Every one with painstaking care when they are outside, at all times.  Everyone following the most stringent procedures when they come back inside the House.

But not enough do it.  Too many live diseased, crippled, and high-mortality lives.  It is difficult not to.  It is very difficult.  And there are agitators who wander through the decay without mask or glove, proclaiming their freedom.  No one else can shout as loud as they can, as they wear no mask.  No one can easily refute their lies that careful living is joyless, because the joy is in the Houses, and no one can go to one, not really, until they have joined it and are washed and cleaned and passed through quarantine.

The strict rules of hygiene are hard, but now with the agitators they are harder.  We can be mocked and attacked for our masks and our gloves.

Some of us wonder why we have be so extreme.  (Those of us are getting the infections and dying off.) Some Houses wonder if they could not spread the word of hygiene better if they weren’t so rigid about it. Masks and washing and stuff appears so alien, we need a hygiene that speaks to today’s youth. After all, the message of hygiene is ultimately a message of health and hope, not despair and grimness. So these Houses wash without washing and ward off disease without warding it off, and perish.