Eighteen months into the pandemic, a time of suffering, isolation and death, you’d think only a masochist (or an idiot) would read a book about another public health scourge. Well, sign me up. I read “The Plague,” a novel by Albert Camus.
The last time I read one of his heady tomes was in high school, when my English teacher assigned the “The Stranger.” I hated it.
Of course, I didn’t understand it at the time, despite whatever class discussions ensued. Existentialism – a philosophy that explores human existence from the lived experience of the individual – was just a big word to me, like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” I understand it better now. In a nutshell, existentialism posits that there is no God…life is absurd…you create your own meaning…and you are free to act but responsible for your actions. It’s a philosophy grounded in everyday life.
But apart from the heavy philosophical and the metaphorical overtones, which might give a wary reader pause, the novel, published in 1947, is eerily relevant and surprisingly engaging. Camus’ descriptions of life in a quarantined Algerian town hit home. Example: “Throughout September and October the town lay prostrate, at the mercy of the plague. There was nothing to do but to ‘mark time,’ and some hundreds of thousands of men and women went on doing this, through weeks that felt interminable.” Sound – and feel – familiar?
Interestingly, the character who deals best with this existential crisis is a man named Cottard, who, after a failed suicide attempt, becomes a happy criminal, finding succor and a newfound profession (smuggling) amidst the horrors of the plague. Not exactly sure what Camus is suggesting, but think of all the con artists, politicians, social media influencers, and big tech companies who took advantage of the pandemic (and us) and profited handsomely by it.
Near the book’s end there’s an agonizing scene as two of the lead characters, a doctor and a priest, watch a young boy die a terrible plague-induced death. The doctor represents science and the priest represents religion, but the town’s populace has abandoned both for superstition and prophesy (today that would be anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theories). And so, the philosophical problem of evil in a world God purportedly created for man’s benefit is confronted.
The problem is resolved when both sides agree that the moral choice is action, rather than despair, and to never give up. The religious man believes that “the sufferings of children were our bread of affliction, but without this bread our souls would die of spiritual hunger.” The medical man realizes “we should go forward, groping our way through the darkness, stumbling perhaps at times, and try to do what God lay in our power.”
Today, less than half the country is fully vaccinated and the Delta variant is threatening new outbreaks. But as the plague retreats, grace rebounds and hope rises. “[T]he whole town was on the move, quitting the dark…and setting forth at last, like a shipload of survivors, toward a land of promise.”
– Special to the Telegram
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