The Plague

by Albert Camus

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.

The manager of the hotel can’t talk about anything else. But he’s also annoyed. Finding rats in the elevator of a respectable hotel seems inconceivable to him. To console him, I said: ‘But everyone is in this situation.’ “ ‘Exactly,’ he replied. ‘Now we’re just like everyone else.’

The press, which had been so talkative about the rat business, no longer had anything to say. It was because rats died in the street, and humans died in their beds. And the papers only concerned themselves with the streets.

And then, as one of my colleagues said, ‘It’s impossible, everyone knows it has disappeared from the West.’ Yes, everyone knew it, except for the dead.

Scourges are actually a communal thing, but it’s hard to believe in them when they’re right in front of you.

He continued to search for his words.

Yes, there was a bit of abstraction and unreality in all this unhappiness. But when the abstraction is trying to kill you, you have to pay attention to it.

On the contrary, never before had Father Paneloux felt a stronger sense of the divine assistance and Christian hope that were offered to all. He hoped against all hope that, despite the horror of these days and the cries of the dying, our fellow citizens would offer heaven the only word that was Christian and that came from love. God would do the rest.

“Understand, Doctor, strictly speaking, it’s pretty easy to choose between but and and. It’s already more difficult when it comes to and or then. The difficulty grows with then and next. But surely the most difficulty comes from knowing whether to put in an and, or to leave it out.” “Yes,” said Rieux, “I understand.”

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.

From the wider point of view of the plague, everyone, from the director down to the last prisoner, was condemned, and an absolute justice reigned in the prison, perhaps for the first time.

It must be said that the plague had taken away from everyone the possibility of love and even the possibility of friendship. For love requires a little bit of future, and we had only a few moments left.

As for the rest, he didn’t have many illusions, and his tiredness took away the ones he still kept. Since he knew that, for the time being, he was no longer a healer. His role was to diagnose. Discovering, seeing, describing, cataloging, and then condemning were his tasks. Spouses grabbed his hand and shouted, “Doctor, save his life!” But he wasn’t there to save lives, he was there to order isolation.

“Nothing in the world is worth turning away from what you love.

“When innocence has its eyes gouged out, a Christian has to either lose his faith or accept having his eyes gouged out.

I say only that there are scourges and victims on this earth, and that we must, as much as possible, refuse to be on the side of the scourge. That may seem a bit simple to you, and I don’t know if it’s simple, but I know that it is true. I’ve heard so much reasoning that almost turned my head, and which had turned enough other heads to make them consent to killing, and I understood that all human sorrow came from not keeping language clear.

Can you be a saint without God—that’s the only concrete question I know these days.”

All that a man could win at the plague’s game, and at life’s, was knowledge and memory.

For the time being, he wanted to be like all those around him who seemed to believe that the plague could come and go without changing the human heart.

It could only be an account of what had to be accomplished, and what will doubtless have to be accomplished again, against terror and its relentless weapon, by all people who, despite their personal heartbreaks, unable to be saints and refusing to accept scourges, nonetheless resolve to become doctors.