The sunny side of infection

If you're a crystal, you like order and logic, your growth is linear and you don't get sick. The plot of your existence also unsurprisingly lacks novelties (well of course this is not the case for a crystallographer).
On the contrary, if you are a living being, the plot of your existence is full of novelties. Actually, your purpose is to set up as much novelties as you can. Indeed we could say that a good chunk of definition for a living being lies on this: you're a living being if you're a thing that left behind (or throw ahead, it’s up to you) the biggest number of novelties in time and/or space.

Now, you can put it this way, viruses are the avant-garde of living being: they don't know why they are doing what they do, they don't care and they are "bohemienne" (a bit parasitic, but I guess it’s a sort of division of labour: in order to have artists, you need bankers and doctors keen to pay them).

Most of all viruses are exploring and their frontier is just what is possibile. They try to combine themselves (to some extent, they try to mate)with everithing. They are the more extreme living being (acutally under a strict definition, they are not living being at all, but I'll pass over this), the more radical experimentalist of possibilities; this activity comes as a provocation to the bourgeois living being left behind in the exploring race. And provocations cause infections in the self-righteous host.

But what you can’t miss is the heritage of infections. Sometimes they are quite nasty, I agree. Let's stay in the happy side and speak of the survivors. In some cases, the host survives implementing the infecting virus in its organism. You don’t believe it? Well think of the placenta: it’s pretty important if you’re a mammal and it’s the inheritance of an ancestral retroviral infection.
Now you can see infections with different eyes: you are on the edge to experiment new possibilities in your plot as a living being (it's just not you in the driving seat, but your virus friend).

The down is you could die, but literature (and nature) is plenty of good character who didn’t make it, so you’re in good company. And the up is you’re running to generate more novelties.

At the end viruses are good: they just try to generate more possibilities. And you’re invited.