The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

by John M. Barry

“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” she described her movement toward death: “She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit she knew to be bottomless . . . and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. . . . Her mind tottered and slithered again, broke from its foundation and spun like a cast wheel in a ditch. . . . [S]he sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, . . . all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end.”