The Plague

by Albert Camus

Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern.

“Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.”

There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.

since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

But what’s the name in this case?” “That I shan’t say, and anyhow you wouldn’t gain anything by knowing.” “You see,” Grand smiled. “It’s not so easy after all!”

he had come, after long experience, to realize that he could always count on living within his means; all he had to do was to scale down his needs to his income.

one had the feeling that many concessions had been made to a desire not to alarm the public.

Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible.

drastic, clean-cut deprivation and our complete ignorance of what the future held in store had taken us unawares; we were unable to react against the mute appeal of presences, still so near and already so far, which haunted us daylong.

the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories.

But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague.

As for that outside world, which can always offer an escape from everything, they shut their eyes to it, bent as they were on cherishing the all-too-real phantoms of their imagination and conjuring up with all their might pictures of a land where a special play of light, two or three hills, a favorite tree, a woman’s smile, composed for them a world that nothing could replace.

In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can’t be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.

If, by some chance, one of us tried to unburden himself or to say something about his feelings, the reply he got, whatever it might be, usually wounded him. And then it dawned on him that he and the man with him weren’t talking about the same thing. For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the marketplace, mass-produced. Whether friendly or hostile, the reply always missed fire, and the attempt to communicate had to be given up.

abstraction sometimes proves itself stronger than happiness; and then, if only then, it has to be taken into account.

“I’d like you to understand, Doctor. I grant you it’s easy enough to choose between a ‘but’ and an ‘and.’ It’s a bit more difficult to decide between ‘and’ and ‘then.’ But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an ‘and’ or leave it out.”

Beckett

Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again.

“At daybreak light breaths of air fan the still empty streets. At this hour, between the night’s victims and the death-agonies of the coming day, it is as if for a while plague stays its hand and takes breath. All shops are shut. But on some a notice: Closed owing to plague, shows that when the others open presently, these will not.

On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.

Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic. And the remedial measures they think up are hardly adequate for a common cold.

“So does every ill that flesh is heir to. What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.

On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.

there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clearsightedness.

Like total depravity

“No, you haven’t understood that it means exactly that—the same thing over and over and over again.”

sisyphus

But you’re capable of dying for an idea; one can see that right away. Well, personally, I’ve seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism; I know it’s easy and I’ve learned it can be murderous.

What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.”

“Man is an idea, and a precious small idea, once he turns his back on love.

there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is—common decency.”

Some, like Rambert, even contrived to fancy they were still behaving as free men and had the power of choice.

Me

The plague was no respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under sentence and, perhaps for the first time, impartial justice reigned in the prison.

True, one could always refuse to face this disagreeable fact, shut one’s eyes to it, or thrust it out of mind, but there is a terrible cogency in the self-evident; ultimately it breaks down all defenses.

So much energy was expended on filling up forms, hunting round for supplies, and lining up that people had no time to think of the manner in which others were dying around them and they themselves would die one day.

General truth

The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.

In the soft hum of well-mannered conversation they regained the confidence denied them when they walked the dark streets of the town; evening dress was a sure charm against plague.

Opening one of these, he took from a sterilizer two masks of cottonwool enclosed in muslin, handed one to Rambert, and told him to put it on. The journalist asked if it was really any use. Tarrou said no, but it inspired confidence in others.

that if Rambert wished to take a share in other people’s unhappiness, he’d have no time left for happiness. So the choice had to be made.

“For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves. Yet that is what I’m doing, though why I do not know.” He sank back on the cushion. “That’s how it is,” he added wearily, “and there’s nothing to be done about it. So let’s recognize the fact and draw the conclusions.” “What conclusions?” “Ah,” Rieux said, “a man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.”

child lay flat, racked on the tumbled bed, in a grotesque parody of crucifixion.

“So if he is to die, he will have suffered longer.”

“Ah! That child, anyhow, was innocent, and you know it as well as I do!”

“That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.”

“No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”

And, truth to tell, nothing was more important on earth than a child’s suffering, the horror it inspires in us, and the reasons we must find to account for it. In other manifestations of life God made things easy for us and, thus far, our religion had no merit. But in this respect He put us, so to speak, with our backs to the wall. Indeed, we all were up against the wall that plague had built around us, and in its lethal shadow we must work out our salvation. He, Father Paneloux, refused to have recourse to simple devices enabling him to scale that wall. Thus he might easily have assured them that the child’s sufferings would be compensated for by an eternity of bliss awaiting him. But how could he give that assurance when, to tell the truth, he knew nothing about it? For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering? He who asserted that would not be a true Christian, a follower of the Master who knew all the pangs of suffering in his body and his soul. No, he, Father Paneloux, would keep faith with that great symbol of all suffering, the tortured body on the Cross; he would stand fast, his back to the wall, and face honestly the terrible problem of a child’s agony. And he would boldly say to those who listened to his words today: “My brothers, a time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything?”

It was wrong to say: “This I understand, but that I cannot accept”; we must go straight to the heart of that which is unacceptable, precisely because it is thus that we are constrained to make our choice.

The plague-stricken Persians and the monks were equally at fault. For the former a child’s agony did not count; with the latter, on the contrary, the natural dread of suffering ranked highest in their conduct. In both cases the real problem had been shirked; they had closed their ears to God’s voice.

Thus, whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in men’s hearts.

For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life.

“And thus I came to understand that I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I’d believed with all my soul that I was fighting it. I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people; that I’d even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only end that way.

I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good.