Hugo Darodius

It is early October on Martha’s Vineyard. The season is over and the island is tranquil. A strange disease appears. It occurs first in a young African American professor spending the fall vacation on the island, and quickly spreads, threatening to engulf the entire year-round population. The condition, called Acute Memory Deficit Syndrome causes selective memory loss. The amnesia involves those memories essential to forming collective identity and individual uniqueness, rupturing the bonds between individual and community, and threatening social chaos. The disease produces perfect health in its victims, plunging them into euphoria, shading into Dionysian ecstasy. Strangely, the disease refuses to move off-island.

Led by an island doctor, and the venerable Oakes Bluff Harbormaster, the Island residents form a self-help organization, the Society of Friends, to preserve their society until a cure is found. The organization quickly becomes an end in itself, and its practices of memory duplication, and empathetic healing lead to extraordinary results.

Hugo Darodius is an extended critique of American democracy as it is, as it has been, and a vision of what it could become.

Excerpt from Hugo Darodius: