A friend of mine has left the world we share. He's not dead, and he hasn't gone anywhere, but—like about a hundred million other Americans—he's relocated himself in imagined time. He resents everything about the present and longs for a past that never was. He's sickened by the unprecedented tyranny of governments and societies that might ask him to wear a mask to protect others' health. He's certain that the art and popular culture of even just fifty years ago were more original and more virtuous than today's mass mediocrity. Politics, manners, mores and amusements: everything about us is corrupt, and it's never been as bad as this before.

If I could do anything for my friend, whom I love, I would start by stealing his phone and the buds on which he listens to podcasts from that other world. I'd take him for long walks in the woods, sign him up for volunteer work at the nearest correctional facility. Join him on a listening tour of Top 40 pop hits of the 20th century, charting relative percentages of deathlessness to dreck.

But if I were granted only one wish, given just one chance to show my friend that resentment and nostalgia are blinding him to the realities of his own time, which is the successor to times which bore no resemblance to his fantasy of vanished virtue, I'd ask that he read Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

Katherine Anne Porter's short novel, first published in the late 1930s, appeared on quite a few 2022 pandemic reading lists. A natural and needful choice. Amazingly few works of American literature recall the "Spanish" Influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which was—with the epidemiologically-unlike exception of the HIV pandemic—the only comparable health crisis in our history. And among those few works that do recall the Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million around the world and 675,000 here in the United States, Pale Horse, Pale Rider may be the only masterpiece.

It is, indelibly, a love story, a tale of romance doomed by plague. Miranda, a young newspaperwoman, falls in love with Adam, a soldier on leave before his unit ships for France. Their courtship is a calamitous idyll, minutes and hours snatched from her miserable job and his brief liberty. In the hours they're apart, Porter writes, from Miranda's point of view, "There was only the wish to see him and the fear, the present threat, of not seeing him again; for every step they took towards each other seemed perilous, drawing them apart instead of together, as a swimmer in spite of his most determined strokes is yet drawn slowly backward by the tide."

Perhaps that sounds sentimental. Don't be fooled. Pale Horse, Pale Rider acknowledges love's tenderness, but never wallows in it. There's no time. Or, rather, the times are brutal, as dismissive of love as the war is contemptuous of life.

I remembered and re-read this love story as the pandemic began and we all locked down. I was glad to regain perspective from scenes like the one after Miranda has taken ill and her landlady is panicked.

“I tell you, they must come for her now, or I’ll put her on the sidewalk. ... I tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God, and I've got a houseful of people to think about.”

Adam said, “I know that. They'll come for her tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning, my god, they better come now!”

“They can't get an ambulance,' said Adam, 'and there aren't any beds. And we can't find a doctor or a nurse. They're all busy. That's all there is to it. You stay out of the room, and I'll look after her.”

“Yes, you'll look after her, I can see that,” said Miss Hobbe, in a particularly unpleasant tone.

Adam tells Miranda that emergency regulations are in force, and she can't be tossed into the street.

"So it's really as bad as that," said Miranda.

"It's as bad as anything can be," said Adam, "all the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and the ambulances all night---"

In 2020, I found comfort in the novel's dreadful precedent. The worst has happened, is happening and will happen again. We will know isolation and suffering and loss so prolonged and outspread it will come to seem a new reality. Then we'll forget it, as we forget pain and dreams.

Reading Pale Horse, Pale Rider again in 2022, the precedents that strike me hardest aren't epidemiological. Not overcrowded hospitals and overwhelmed morgues. And they're not romantic, though I'm confident that today's readers, too, will ever-after think of Miranda and Adam when they think about falling in love.

It's all the brilliant and brutal rest, the United States of 1918 Porter calls back to life. Popular culture is dismal, derivative trash. Women's rights to self-determination are tenuous at best. Job security is nonexistent. Racial inequality is blandly accepted by most white people. Democracy has devolved into demagoguery and hate-mongering. Civil liberties are being crushed in the name of national security. A pointless war is ending in exhaustion.

The novel begins with a harrowing scene of patriotic extortion, as two war-bond scalpers attempt to bully Miranda—who makes $18 a week—into buying a $50 bond. As a theater critic, she works in a newspaper industry that was the Internet of its day; Porter relieves us of our nostalgia for print journalism by reminding us of small-mindedness, cynicism and pay-for-publicity corruption that make deep fakes and clickbait seem wholesome. Her sexuality is policed by her bosses and her landlady, enforcers of a double standard that could easily punish her with homelessness and even jail time.

Leaving a theater, already feeling feverish, Miranda feels both alienated from and desperate for connection with the people