Plagues and Wars

In his "Harlequin" chapter on the writing of Bruce Chatwin's Utz (1988), Nicholas Shakespeare writes:

"In Love Undetectable, Andrew Sullivan, an HIV-positive and openly homosexual writer, asks what can be purchased from the horror of AIDS: 'Plagues and wars do this to people. They force them to ask more fundamental questions of who they are and what they want ... Out of cathartic necessity and loss and endurance comes, at least for a while, a desire to turn these things into something constructive, to appease the trauma by some tangible residue that can give meaning and dignity to what has happened.'" (508)