Rereading The Plague and Facing Adversity

"Heroism and sanctity don't interest me...What interests me is being a man."

Camus' The Plague remains the very first books that changed the way I saw my place in the world. I was seventeen, in my last year of high school, and craving a way of understanding the world outside of the strict lens of religion with which I was brought up.

From my first juvenile, high-school-mandated reading, I retained little of the actual narrative save blurry images of an ugly, nondescript Algerian coastal town where rats emerged to perform agonising deaths on doorsteps and staircases. There was a doctor, Rieux; a civil servant obsessed with a single sentence, Grand; ; a man who tried to hang himself, Cottard; a selfless man who flung himself into the futile fight, Tarrou; an outsider desperate to escape, Rambert; and an unlikeable priest, Paneloux. The personal struggles of the characters intermeshed with the scenes of faceless victims trapped in the plagued city became the metaphor through which I struggled to adopt big, new words: absurdism, existentialism.

What had clutched me the most was the friction between the long-suffering doctor Rieux and the pompous priest Paneloux. It was the first time I was confronted with the world's unknowable chaos and religion's limits. Caught between final exams and university applications, the idea that life has no fixed meaning, that there is no predetermined purpose to existence, felt overwhelmingly revolutionary. This thought struck me above all else:

"Since the world is regulated by death...perhaps it's better for God if we do not believe in him, and we instead fight against death as best we can, without looking up to the sky, where he is silent."*

Camus' cynicism towards religion, his offering a humanist alternative, this idea that we must make our own way in an absurd and senseless world shattered and reshaped the way I understood the world, and my place in it.

I came to be convinced of Camus' existentialist absurdism, this notion of our capacity to derive meaning in an indifferent world. On the cusp of becoming my own person, I waded confidently into adulthood armed with Camus' belief in the goodness of man, and his duty to endure adversity alongside his fellow beings. Camus' philosophy became a mainstay in how I have subsequently navigated the start of my fresh adult life. The Plague was simply the channel through which I came to adopt an agnostic worldview.

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That The Plague is a great work of literature is clear from its first pages. Through non-sentimental, clipped prose, Camus, through the Doctor Rieux, leads the reader gently through the passing months in a city stultified by the plague. The seasons are succinctly captured throughout, giving a comfortable rhythm to the chapters, even as the scenes are slowly leached of hope.

Camus paints powerfully evocative scenes in very few words. As the citizens slowly come to realise they can no longer ignore their grim reality, the chapters are still infused with the glow of sunset, the flittering of swallows, the smells of flowers in the deserted marketplace, the confused din of the streets. Camus ties the shifting scenes of the city with the shifting psychology of its citizens. A masterly example is that of the sudden proliferation of rubber galoshes and outer garments on the streets as autumn approaches, because the citizens have begun to believe rubber can protect against the disease.

The novel is also a study in how individuals react to adversity. Outsider journalist Rambert's plans a convoluted route of escape. Tarrou's knee-jerk reaction is to throw himself into the fight in the hospitals against the invisible, insidious onslaught. Doctor Rieux quietly does his job, treating those he can. Father Paneloux preaches from his pulpit that the plague is a punishment sent from God. The hopes, beliefs and desires of these men are tried and tested against the tide of the plague. Each are, in their own ways, enduring an insufferable existence, fighting not so much for life but against death.

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Seven years after reading The Plague for the first time, I was working in a bookshop as a virus descends on London. It was a week before the city would be plunged into lockdown. Near the end of the day, there was a single stack books on the empty shelving table in the quiet, blank basement. An ominous tower of The Plague.

Calls from customers asking for the title had come pouring in. Of course people reached for Camus to brace themselves for an oncoming pandemic. But what did they hope to find? Solace? Distraction? A guide on how to cope with inordinate amounts of human suffering? Did the oncoming clouds of corona simply remind them of this great book's existence?

Perhaps it was the seven year difference, but this second reading was a wildly different one from my first abstract initiation into modern French philosophy. This time, I couldn't see past the death. And all the trauma the threat of death necessitates. Namely, the agony of an absent loved one.

All lives are suspended by the plague. Some unluckier ones are cleaved into two: separated from their loved ones by the sudden, arbitrary arrival of the disease. Rieux is isolated from his wife who is sent to a sanitarium outside of Oran before the Plague. Rambert is desperate to escape and rejoin his lover in Paris. They share a mutual, desperate drive of hope that stutters into paralysis, destroying all thoughts of the past and all considerations for the future, until they cease to truly long for them:

"Nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. Because thinking about somebody is to think about them minute by minute, without being distracted by anything, not one's chores, not a fly, not one's meals, nor one's itches. But there are always flies and itches. That's why life is so difficult to live."^

This time around, it was this grim thought that struck the hardest. This thought that, even when facing the worst adversity, life's most important ties are still drowned out by trivial yet unshakeable minutiae.

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It took me a long two months to finish the book for a second time. Not because it's a particularly lengthy book, but because I had to regularly pause to remove myself from the horror that mimicked the dreaded news pings on my phone screen.

I struggled through the slow, drawn out death of a child as I learn of a thirteen-year-old from Brixton succumbing to the virus.

Faceless death pits smouldered with limestone in the outskirts of Oran as aerial pictures appeared of mass graves for anonymous bodies on Hart Island, New York.

Smoke poured perpetually from Oran's crematorium as an ice rink in Spain is turned into a temporary morgue.

Brutal fifteen minute burials overlapped on the page as in memoriams for beloved grandparents and uncles break through my social media feed. "The hardest thing is not being able to bury him," reads one.

Why were these scenes not seared into my memory from my first reading? Perhaps it's the simple answer of life around me imitating art. This second time around, adversity was no longer abstraction, no longer simply a metaphor to challenge how one should live ones' life. It was an urgent, pulsing, horrendous reality.

If I had been looking for a lifeline amidst the escalating pandemic, I didn't find one of firm solace in The Plague with its parallel scenes choking with death, self-denial and horror. Instead, I found a pursed-lipped stoicism that made me realise endurance was possible. I found companions alongside whom the world's suffering swirling around me was easier to brave.

I first read The Plague in simpler times. I was young, I had yet to understand what forging meaning for oneself against adversity really means. That it means in a world devoid of meaning, we make meaning by fighting anyway. Or that we all live in the shadow of our own deaths, but living it with and for others make this life and its endless adversities worthwhile. Life may be difficult to live, but Camus assures us its still worth enduring.

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*"Mais puisque l'ordre du monde est réglé par la mort, peut-être vaut-il mieux pour Dieu qu'on ne croie pas en lui et qu'on lutte de toute ses forces contre la mort, sans lever les yeux vers ce ciel où il se tait"

^"on s'aperçoit que personne n'est capable réellement de penser à personne, fût-ce dans le pire des malheurs. Car penser réellement à quelqu'un, c'est d'y penser minute après minute, san être distrait par rien, ni les soins du ménage, ni la mouche qui vole, ne les repas, ni les démangeaisons. Mais il y a toujours des mouches et des démangeaisons. C'est pourquoi la vie est difficile à vivre."

(Rough translations my own.)