The Plague

by Albert Camus

How to picture, for example, a city without pigeons, without trees and gardens, where you encounter neither the beating of wings nor the rustling of leaves, in short, a neutral space?

One useful way to get to know a city is to find out how people work there, how they love there, and how they die there.

Naturally, they also have a taste for simple pleasures: they love women, the movies, and swimming in the sea. But very sensibly, they save these pleasures for Saturday night and Sunday, trying, on other days, to make a lot of money.

Think of the person who is dying, caught in the trap of a hundred walls sizzling in the heat, while at the same minute, a whole population is on the telephone or in cafés, talking about bank drafts, bills of lading, or discounts. You understand what might be uncomfortable about death, even modern death, when it arises in such a dry place.

It’s just regrettable that the city was built with its back turned to this bay, and as a result, it is impossible to glimpse the sea, and you always have to go looking for it.

Our fellow citizens were like everyone else in this regard—they thought about themselves, which is to say they were humanists, they didn’t believe in scourges. A scourge is not on a human scale, and so people say it isn’t real; it’s a bad dream that will pass. But it doesn’t always pass, and, from bad dream to bad dream, it’s the humans who pass, and the humanists first, because they didn’t heed the warnings.

They continued to go about their business, they prepared for their journeys, and they had their opinions. How could they have imagined that a plague would cancel the future, the travel and conversations?

And since a dead man carries no weight unless you’ve seen him dead, a hundred million corpses strewn across history are nothing but smoke in the imagination.

In the middle of an animated conversation, she had mentioned a recent arrest that caused controversy in Algiers. A young office worker had killed an Arab on a beach.

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In truth, we suffered twice over—our own suffering first and then what we imagined the absent one, son, wife, or lover, was suffering.

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Instead, the narrator is tempted to believe that by lending too much importance to honorable actions, you end up paying an indirect, powerful homage to evil. Because this way, you allow people to suppose that honorable actions have such high value because they are rare, and that wickedness and indifference are much more frequent drivers behind human actions.

But you don’t congratulate a teacher for instructing that two and two equals four. You might congratulate them for having chosen that fine profession.

There were no longer any individual destinies, only a collective story of the plague and the feelings everyone shared. The biggest was separation and exile, along with the accompanying fear and revolt.

But Rieux straightened up and said in a firm voice that this was stupid, and that there was no shame in preferring happiness. “Yes,” said Rambert, “but there is shame in being happy all alone.”

I learned that I had indirectly endorsed the death of thousands of men, that I had even provoked that death by finding good in the actions and principles that inevitably led to it.

I feel more solidarity with the vanquished than with the saints. I don’t have a taste, I don’t think, for heroism and sainthood. What interests me is being human.”

For several minutes they moved forward with the same cadence and the same force, solitary, far from the world, freed at last from the city and the plague.