The Plague

by Albert Camus

Of course, nothing is more natural these days than to see people work morning till night before choosing to waste, at cards, in cafés, or in small talk, what time they have left to live.

When a war breaks out, people say “It won’t last long, it’s too stupid.” And no doubt a war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t stop it from lasting. Stupidity always endures, people notice it if they think outside themselves.

How could they have imagined that a plague would cancel the future, the travel and conversations? They thought they were free, and no one will ever be free as long as there are scourges.

When you’re at war, you barely have any idea of what a dead man is. 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.

“What matters,” said Castel, “is not whether this line of reasoning is good, but whether it makes us think.”

Like this, they experienced the deep suffering of all prisoners and all exiles, which is to live with a useless memory.

Impatient with their present, enemies with their past, and deprived of a future, we very much resembled those who had been sent to live behind bars by human justice or human hate.

But what’s true of all the world’s ills is also true of the plague. It might help a few people grow. Nonetheless, when you see the suffering and the pain it brings, you’d have to be crazy, blind, or cowardly to resign yourself to the plague.”

He hasn’t seen enough death and that’s why he speaks in the name of truth. But the lowliest country priest who ministers to his parishioners and who has heard a dying man’s breath would think like me. He would treat the suffering before trying to prove its excellence.”

if he believed in an all-powerful God, he would stop healing people, leaving him to care for them. But that no one in the world, no, not even Paneloux who believed he believed, thought that kind of God existed, since no one abandoned themselves totally, and that in this at least, he, Rieux, believed he was on the true path, fighting against creation, such as it was.

Rieux "fighting against creation" to end sickness puts him in a supernatural, godlike position.

“Who taught you all of this, Doctor?” He answered immediately: “Suffering.”

The evil in this world almost always comes from ignorance, and goodwill can do as much damage as wickedness if it’s not well informed. Men are good more than they are evil, and honestly, that’s beside the point. But they are more or less ignorant, and this is what we call vice or virtue, and the most desperate vice comes from the person who is ignorant but believes he knows everything, and who authorizes himself to kill.

But there always comes a time in history where he who dares to say that two and two equals four is condemned to death.

Orwell's 1984

I’ve had enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism, I know it’s easy, and I’ve learned that it can kill. What interests me is living and dying for what we love.” Rieux had listened to the journalist carefully. Without breaking his gaze, he said gently: “Humanity isn’t an idea, Rambert.”

“You don’t believe in the good Lord?” said the old woman who went to Mass every morning. Rambert allowed that he didn’t, and the old woman said once again that this was why. “You must go back to her, you’re right. If you don’t, who will you have left?”

In the sky, swept and polished by the wind, pure stars shone and the faraway beam of the lighthouse from time to time added its transitory spark. The breeze brought scents of spices and stone. The silence was total.

I don’t have a taste, I don’t think, for heroism and sainthood. What interests me is being human.” “Yes, we’re searching for the same thing, but I’m less ambitious.”

In the end, it’s stupid to live under the plague alone. Of course, a man must fight for the victims. But if he stops loving anything else, then what use is his fight?”

At that moment Rieux knew what the crying old man was thinking, and he thought the same way, that this world without love was like a dead world, and that there always comes a moment when people tire of prisons, work, and courage and cry out for a human face and a heart enthralled with tenderness.

The whole city rushed outside to celebrate that fraught moment when the time of sufferings was ending and the time for forgetting had not yet begun.

The others say: ‘It’s the plague, we had the plague.’ They might as well be asking for a medal. But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”

he could bear witness on behalf of those plagued people, to leave at least some memory of the injustice and the violence done to them, and to write simply about what can be learned in the middle of scourges, that there is more to admire in humans than there is to scorn.