The Plague by Albert Camus

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

I picked up this book in 2025, a couple years after COVID-19 ravaged across the world, grounding airplanes, locking borders, imposing strict quarantining, as we declared the first pandemic of the new Century.

A smell of seaweed and salt rose from the wind-tossed, always invisible sea. This empty town, white with dust, saturated with sea smells, loud with the howl of the wind, would groan at such times like an island of the damned.

The more I read of The Plague by Albert Camus, the more I felt connected to the vast feelings I and so many others felt during those 3 years - feelings that as things returned to normal, we swallowed and did our best to ignore. It unlocked the anxiety, the never-ending drill of the present moment, the incessant roll-call of those who had fallen to the invisible spectre. I was in awe that Camus, having no experience of the pandemic, wrote a deeply compelling account which we lived through now.

“ 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.”

It’s unique historical context lends this tale an allegorical account of French occupation by the Germans of a similar town that Camus himself experienced. The text tries its best to be apolitical through a the clever technique of narration, Camus employing a narrator in the story who aims to describe what happened in retrospect with as much objectivity as possible. This style of storytelling is so interesting because in the moments where subjective opinion bleeds through, one cannot tell if its the character himself or Camus. This text was a jewel of its time, the perfect goldilocks zone before the end of World War II, avoiding the resentment and anger of the French, and before the nascent vitriol of the Cold War.

For us, this is not entirely necessary because more importantly, as a text it explores humanity under duress. Camus based it on zeitgeist of World War II, but for us, the most recent Coronavirus pandemic was a nearly one to one account of this novel.

We follow Dr. Rieux, the doctor who discovered the plague in his unremarkable town. We witness the first reaction of disbelief, and observe how it transforms into clear eyed terror. How people respond to world-altering events. How the melting pot of human emotion solidifies into stillness, as the town is locked down. The way to make sense of this world dissolves, religion and contemporary philosophy failing to address the sheer amount of pain and suffering. We witness characters who the narrator is wary to call ‘brave’ - the first responders and doctors doing their best to control the outbreak - instead ascribing their actions as the natural course of action in duress. Love becoming a source of loneliness.

I cannot state just how much I loved this novel, it really stuck with me and I couldn’t stop myself underlining paragraphs and sentences, most of which I’ve attached below.

A warmth of life, and an image of death: that is Knowledge.

Camus as an artist, created this with a tone of reflection. I thoroughly believe not enough people have reflected on the collective trauma we lived through a few years ago, the impacts of which manifest in the most unlikely of ways, instead casting our experience aside like shackles.

Taking this tale as it was intended, we are warned of how Evil is ever present, ready to ensnare us again if the chance comes. A highly recommended read.

Read sometime in January 2025.

“Despite thirty years and the marks of her illness, this face always seemed youthful to Rieux, perhaps because of the smile, which swept away everything else.”

“The forehead he kissed was slightly damp. The smile followed him to the door.”

“Then he very quickly told her that he wanted to ask for her forgiveness, he should have watched over her, and he had neglected her often. She shook her head, as if to silence him. ”

“Please,” he said, “take care of yourself” But she could not have heard him.”

“It was as though the very solid on which our houses were built was purging itself an excess of bile, that it was letting boils and abscesses rise to the surface, which up till then had been devouring it inside.”

“They can’t harm a sick man, a man who’s hung himself, can they, Doctor?”

“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, as people would notice it if they were not always thinking about themselves.

“Our fellow citizens were no guiltier than others, they forgot to be humble, that’s all, and they thought everything was still possible for them, which meant that pestilences were impossible.”

Why should they have thought about the plague, which negates the future, negates journeys and debates?

The doctor was still looking out of the window. On one side of the glass was the cool, fresh sky of spring; on the other was the word that still resounded round the room: plague. The word contained not only what science had seen fit to put in it, but a long succession of extraordinary images that had nothing to do with this grey and yellow town, moderately busy at this time, humming rather than noisy, happy in short, if it is possible to be happy and drab at one and the same time. And such peaceful and unthinking tranquillity almost effortlessly contradicted the old images of pestilence: Athens stricken, abandoned by its birds; Chinese towns full of people dying in silence; the convicts of Marseille piling dripping corpses into holes; the building of the great wall in Provence in the hope of holding back the raging wind of plague; Jaffa and its ghastly beggars; beds, damp and rotten, sticking to the earth floor of the hospital in Constantinople; sick people dragged along by hooks; the carnival of masked doctors during the Black Death; the living copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; the carts of the dead in a London paralysed with terror; and days and nights filled, everywhere and always, with the endless cries of men.

“Richard hesitated and turned to Rieux. “Truthfully, tell me your thoughts—are you certain this is the plague?” “You’re looking at the problem wrong. It’s not a question of vocabulary, it’s a question of time.” the high stakes moments that changed history

The great roars of invisible boats and the murmur that rose from the sea and from the swelling crowd by night, this moment that Rieux knew so well and once had loved, now seemed oppressive to him because of all that he knew.

The doctor was still looking out of the window. On one side of the glass was the cool, fresh sky of spring; on the other was the word that still resounded round the room: plague. The word contained not only what science had seen fit to put in it, but a long succession of extraordinary images that had nothing to do with this grey and yellow town, moderately busy at this time, humming rather than noisy, happy in short, if it is possible to be happy and drab at one and the same time. And such peaceful and unthinking tranquillity almost effortlessly contradicted the old images of pestilence: Athens stricken, abandoned by its birds; Chinese towns full of people dying in silence; the convicts of Marseille piling dripping corpses into holes; the building of the great wall in Provence in the hope of holding back the raging wind of plague; Jaffa and its ghastly beggars; beds, damp and rotten, sticking to the earth floor of the hospital in Constantinople; sick people dragged along by hooks; the carnival of masked doctors during the Black Death; the living copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; the carts of the dead in a London paralysed with terror; and days and nights filled, everywhere and always, with the endless cries of men.

So telegrams became our only recourse. Creatures bound together by mutual sympathy, by flesh and heart, were reduced to finding the signs of this ancient communion in a ten-word dispatch, all written in capitals. And since, as it happens, the forms of words that can be used in a telegram are quickly exhausted, before long whole lives together or painful passions were reduced to a periodic exchange of stock phrases such as ‘Am well’, ‘Thinking of you, ‘Affectionately yours’®

Hence, foundering halfway between the abyss and the peak, they drifted rather than lived, given up to aimless days and sterile memories, wandering shadows who could only have found strength by resigning themselves to taking root in the soil of their distress.

“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 in one sense all these changes were so extraordinary and had happened so quickly that it was not easy to consider them as normal and lasting. The result was that we continued to give priority to our personal feelings. when it felt like a temporary situation

‘Have pity, doctor!’ said Mme Loret, mother of the chambermaid who worked at Tarrou’s hotel. What did that mean? Of course he had pity. But where did that get anyone?

To struggle against abstraction, one must come to resemble it a little.

On the wall a few notices advertised a happy, free life in Bandol or Cannes. Here Rambert experienced the sort of fearful freedom that one finds in utter destitution.

Yes, this is the time when one sleeps and that is reassuring because the great wish of the uneasy heart is endlessly to possess the being that it loves and, when the time of absence arrives, to be able to plunge that being into a dreamless sleep which can only come to an end on that day when the two are reunited.

No, but what does that mean? I am in darkness, trying to see the light. I stopped a long time ago thinking there was anything unusual in that.’

Do you know that there are people who refuse to die? Have you ever heard a woman cry out “Never!” at the moment of death? I have. And I realized then that I could not get used to it.

But the narrator is rather inclined to believe that by giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men. The narrator does not share this view. The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened.

In reality, it was no great merit on the part of those who dedicated themselves to the health teams, because they knew that it was the only thing to be done and not doing it would have been incredible at the time. The teams helped the townspeople to get further into the plague and to some extent convinced them that, since the disease was here, they had to do whatever needed to be done to overcome it. So, because the plague became the responsibility of some of us, it appeared to be what it really was - a matter that concerned everybody. do we congratulate doing the natural thing?

There was nothing admirable about this truth, it simply followed as a logical consequence.

Yes, if men really do have to offer themselves models and examples whom they call heroes, and if there really has to be one in this story, the narrator would like to offer this insignificant and self-effacing hero who had nothing to recommend him but a little goodness in his heart and an apparently ridiculous ideal.

‘Everyone is like that, said Tarrou. ‘You just need to give them the opportunity? He smiled and winked at Rieux. ‘It’s my task in life, that: to give opportunities.’

What interests me, is living or dying for what one loves?

‘Ah!’ said Rambert, furiously. I don’t know what my job is. Perhaps I really am wrong to choose love?’ Rieux stood in front of him. ‘No!’ he said emphatically. ‘You are not wrong.’ Rambert looked thoughtfully at them. I suppose the two of you have nothing to lose in all this. It’s easier to be on the right side.’

A smell of seaweed and salt rose from the wind-tossed, always invisible sea. This empty town, white with dust, saturated with sea smells, loud with the howl of the wind, would groan at such times like an island of the damned.

It was these incidents that forced the authorities to compare the plague to a state of siege and to apply the appropriate laws.

Under a moonlit sky, its whitish walls and regular streets extended in straight lines, never broken by the black shape of a tree, never disturbed by the steps of a passer-by or the howl of a dog. The silent town was henceforth a heap of massive, motionless cubes between which the mute statues of forgotten benefactors or former great men, stifled for ever in bronze, were left alone trying with their imitation faces in stone or iron to suggest a degraded image of what the man used to be.

However, after a short time, they were obliged to go and look elsewhere and gain some more space. A decree from the Prefect expropriated the occupants from graves leased in perpetuity and all the remains dug up were sent off to the crematorium. Soon it was also necessary to take those who had died from the plague off for cremation. But for this they had to use the old incinerating ovens to the east of the town, outside the gates.

• overt concentration camp reference

While up to this point they had fiercely subtracted their suffering from the sum of collective misfortune, now they accepted it as part of the whole. Withour memory and without hope, they settled into the present In truth, everything became present for them. The truth must be told: the plague had taken away from all of them the power of love or even of friend-ship, for love demands some future, and for us there was only the here and now.

• a reason why I began to meditate

The plague had suppressed value judgements. This could be seen in the way that no one cared any longer about the quality of the clothes or the food that they bought. Everything was accepted as it came.”

• the great levelling field

If someone told them a figure, they would pretend to be interested, but in fact greet it with that absent-minded indifference that one imagines to be the attitude of soldiers in great wars, exhausted by toil and simply determined not to fail in their daily duties, while looking forward to the final push or the day of the armistice. this what the daily COVID numbers felt like.

He would rather be under siege with everybody than a prisoner all alone.

The shrinking from any contact and yet the hunger for human warmth that draws people towards one another, elbow to elbows and sexual organs to sexual organs?

people had never wasted so much money and while most of them lacked the essentials, they had never more effectively dissipated the superfluous.

• literally what happened - so much consumerism.

When, like Cottard, you have spent your days looking for possible police spies in everyone, even people you liked being with, you can understand the feeling. One can very well sympathize with those people who live with the idea that from one day to the next the plague might touch them on the shoulder and that it is perhaps getting ready to do so just as one is congratulating oneself on still being safe and sound. As far as one can be, Cottard is at ease in terror. But because he has felt all this before them, I think that he cannot really feel how cruel this uncertainty is. In short, with us, who have not yet died of the plague, he is aware that his freedom and his life are on the brink of destruction at any moment. But since he has himself lived in terror, he considers it normal that others should experience it in their turn.

At my age, you’ve got to mean what you say. It’s too tiring to lie.’ “Tarrou,’ the journalist said. ‘T’d like to see the doctor. Excuse me.’ ‘I know, he’s more human than I am. Let’s go?

‘Doctor,’ Rambert said. ‘I’m not leaving and I want to stay with you. Tarrou did not flinch. He carried on driving. Rieux appeared incapable of escaping from his fatigue. “What about her?’ he said in a dull voice. Rambert said that he had thought it over again. He still believed what he believed, but if he went away he would feel ashamed. It would make him uncomfortable loving the woman he had left. But Rieux sat up and said firmly that this was ridiculous and that there was no shame in choosing happiness. ‘Yes,’ said Rambert. ‘But there may be shame in being happy all by oneself.’ Tarrou, who had said nothing up to now, remarked without turning his head that if Rambert wanted to share the misfortunes of mankind, he would never again have time for happiness. You had to choose. ‘That’s not it,’ said Rambert. ‘I always thought that I was a stranger in this town and had nothing to do with you. But now that I have seen what I have seen, I know that I come from here, whether I like it or not. This business concerns all of us.’ No one answered and Rambert seemed irritated. In any case, you know that as well as I do! Otherwise, what are you doing in that hospital of yours? Have you made your choice then and given up on happiness?’ Still neither Tarrou nor Rieux answered. The silence lasted a long time, until they were close to the doctor’s house. Then once more Rambert asked his last question, still more emphatically. Only Rieux turned towards him, raising himself with difficulty. ‘I’m sorry Rambert, he said. ‘But I don’t know. Stay with us if that’s what you want.’

And, in truth, there was nothing on earth more important than the suffering of a child and the horror that this suffering brings with it and the explanation that had to be found for it.

Here Father Paneloux recalled the towering figure of Bishop Belzunce during the plague in Marseille. He reminded his listeners that towards the end of the epidemic, after the Bishop had done everything that he thought he should do, believing that there was no further remedy, he took some supplies and shut himself up in his house which he had walled up. The inhabitants of the city, who idolized him, in a change of feeling such as one finds in excessive misfortune, became angered against him, surrounded his house with corpses to infect him and even threw bodies over the walls to ensure that he would be more certain to die. So the Bishop, in a last moment of weakness, had thought that he could isolate himself from the world of death, and the dead were falling from heaven on to his head. The same must be true of us: we must not believe that there is any island in the plague. No, there is no middle way. We must accept what is outrageous, because we have to choose to hate God or to love Him. And who would choose hatred of God? stop making sense of the senseless

Poor families consequently found themselves in a very difficult situation, while the rich lacked for practically nothing. Because of the efficient impartiality which it brought to its administrations, the plague should have worked for greater equality among our fellow-citizens through the normal interplay of egoism, but in fact it heightened the feeling of injustice in the hearts of men.

• Likewise, foreshadowed COVID’s extreme wealth disparity.

Since they could not always be thinking about death, they thought about nothing. They were taking a holiday. ‘But the worst thing, Tarrou wrote, ‘is that these are forgotten people and they know it.

• of those who were sent into isolation camps for a long time

Rieux knew what the old man was thinking at that moment as he wept, and he thought the same: that this world without love was like a dead world and that there always comes a time when one grows tired of prisons, work and courage, and yearns for the face of another human being and the wondering, affectionate heart.

• love this paragraph, the symbolism here is the cavity of love that stubbornly stays, drawing pain.

‘Read it,’ said Grand. And Rieu read: ‘On a fine morning in the month of May, an elegant woman was riding a magnificent sorrel mare, amid the Rower, down the avenues ad the Bois de Boulogne.’ “Is that it?’ the old man said feverishly. Rieux did not look up.

• tingles and tears - this was the paragraph that Grand was working on his whole adult life

And you could say that as soon as it became possible for people to have the tiniest scrap of hope, the effective reign of the plague was over.

• what was the initial moments of the Pandemic like when there was no cure?

Tarrou thought that the plague would and would not change the town; that, of course, the greatest desire of our fellow-citizens was and would be to behave as though nothing had happened, and that, consequently, in a sense nothing would have changed; but that, in another sense, one cannot forget everything, with the best will in the world, so the plague would leave its mark, at least on people’s hearts.

• the essence of the novel & pandemic impact now too

‘Rieux,’ he finally managed to get out. ‘You must tell me everything, I need that.’ ‘I promise.?’ The other man twisted his face into a smile. “Thank you. I don’t want to die and I shall fight. But if the struggle is lost, I want to make a good end.’ Rieux bent down and squeezed his shoulder. ‘No,’ he said. ‘To become a saint, you have to live. Fight it.’

• do you wish to be a saint?

This human form, which had been so close to him, was now pierced with spears, burnt up with a superhuman fire and twisted by all the malevolent winds of the skies; it was sinking before his eyes into the waters of the plague and he could do nothing to prevent its wreck. He had to stay on the shore, his hands empty and his heart wrenched. with no means, once more, to prevent this disaster. In the end it was tears of frustration which stopped Rieux from seeing Tarrou quickly turn towards the wall and expire with a hollow moan as though, somewhere in him, some essential cord had snapped.

• the death of Tarrou from the plague - the writing sends you reeling

The doctor did not know whether Tarrou in the end had found peace, but at this moment at least, he thought he knew that there would no longer be any peace possible for himself, any more than there is an armistice for the mother torn from her son or for the man who buries his friend. aghhh

Tarrou had lost the game, as he said. But what had he, Rieux, won? All he had gained was to have known the plague and to remember it, to have known friendship and to remember it, to have known affection and to have one day to remember it. All that a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory. Perhaps that was what Tarrou called winning the game!

• what are the scars we carry?

A warmth of life, and an image of death: that is Knowledge.

• what a powerful line

Cottard, Tarrou, the men and the woman whom Rieux had loved and lost, all, dead or guilty, were forgotten. The old man had been right, men were always the same. But this was their strength and their innocence, and it was at this point, above all suffering, that Rieux felt he was one of them.

• the dust when it settles

In this context, Albert Camus’s allegory of the wartime occupation of France reopened a painful chapter in the recent French past, but in an indirect and ostensibly apolitical key. It thus avoided arousing partisan hackles, except at the extremes of Left and Right, and took up sensitive topics without provoking a refusal to listen. Had the novel appeared in 1945, the angry, partisan mood of revenge would have drowned its moderate reflections on justice and responsibility. Had it been delayed until the 1950s its subject-matter would probably have been overtaken by new alignments born of the Cold War.

• this book was a jewel of its unique time

Albert Camus - “everyone wants the man who is still searching for answers to have reached his conclusions”.

He was a public man of action, who insisted that all truly important questions came down to individual acts of kindness and goodness. And, like Tarrou, he was a believer in absolute truths who accepted the limits of the possible: ‘Other men will make history… All I say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims - and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence

“Indeed, as he heard the cries of delight rising from the city, Rieux remembered that this delight was always threatened. For he knew what this joyous crowd did not, and what you can read in books—that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears, that it can lie dormant for decades in furniture and linens, that it waits patiently in rooms, in basements, in trunks, among handkerchiefs and paperwork, and that perhaps the day would come when, for the sorrow and education of men, the plague would revive its rats and dispatch them to die in a happy city.”

• evil exists

Created by Apurva Shukla.

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