Covid and La Peste - Camus Had It Right

I was thinking, today, about the anti-quarantine protestors and the others who have refused even the most minimal protections (of themselves and others) from Covid-19, and I was put in mind of this passage from Camus’ La Peste.

The test is below, but I've also read it and posted it to Soundcloud. Just click here and you'll be taken to where you can hear it.


From The Plague, by Albert Camus


The word “plague” had just been uttered for the  first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr.  Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the  doctor’s uncertainty and surprise — since, with  very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of  the great majority of our townsfolk. Everybody knows that  pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues  as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people  equally by surprise. 


In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his  guard, and we should understand his hesitations in the light of this fact; and similarly understand how he was tom between conflicting fears and confidence. When a war breaks  out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But  though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent  its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we  should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. 


In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else,  wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a  thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves  that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that  will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from  one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the  humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions. Our townsfolk were not more to blame than  others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought  that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing  business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How  should they have given a thought to anything like plague,  which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one  will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.  

~~~

 

 About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

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