The Plague

by Albert Camus

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.”

And 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.

a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and

Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile.

It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile—that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.

even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea—anyhow, as soon as could be—once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it.

Just like we all gave up on thinking when the Pandemic was going to end , it was better to not have any hope rather than have our hopes dashed over and over again.

Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories,

Sterile memories ... such an exceptionally resonant way to describe how it feels to remember better days but have no recourse to be able to relive even a semblance of them out.

What first brought these home to them was the trouble they experienced in summoning up any clear picture of what the absent one was doing.

The abstraction of the loved one and a commentary on how much of our lives depend on our first person perspective. It is so very hard to integrate the realities of existence in the pictures of the people that we love. We instead go around carrying around abstractions and idealizations that if tested by the pain of separation, show us how little we truly know of the people that we claim to know and love so deeply.

They came to deplore their ignorance of the way in which that person used to spend his or her days, and reproached themselves for having troubled too little about this in the past, and for having affected to think that, for a lover, the occupations of the loved one when they are not together could be a matter of indifference and not a source of joy.

And, in a very definite way, this misfortune which had come from outside and befallen a whole town did more than inflict on us an unmerited distress with which we might well be indignant. It also incited us to create our own suffering and thus to accept frustration as a natural state.

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.

Speaking to the subtle difference between what one says and what is heard. To the difference between what is felt and what can be expressed and even to a difference between what is expressed and what is understood.

One of the cafés had the brilliant idea of putting up a slogan: “The best protection against infection is a bottle of good wine,” which confirmed an already prevalent opinion that alcohol is a safeguard against infectious disease.

Could that term “abstraction” really apply to these days he spent in his hospital while the plague was battening on the town, raising its death-toll to five hundred victims a week? Yes, an element of abstraction, of a divorce from reality, entered into such calamities. Still when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it.

To fight abstraction you must have something of it in your own make-up.

since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one,

When I entered this profession, I did it ‘abstractedly,’ so to speak; because I had a desire for it, because it meant a career like another, one that young men often aspire to.

I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.” “Yes. A never ending defeat.”

“Who taught you all this, Doctor?” The reply came promptly: “Suffering.”

the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.