Albert Camus, Plague, Vintage International,121:
Toward two o'clock the town slowly empties, it is the time when silence, sunlight, dust, and plague have the streets to themselves. Wave after wave of heat flows over the frontage of the tall gray houses during these long, languid hours. Thus the afternoon wears on, slowly merging into an evening that settles down like a red winding-sheet onto the serried tumult of the town. At the start of the great heat, for some unascertained reason, the evenings found the streets almost empty. But now the least ripple of cooler air brings an easing of the strain, if not a flutter of hope. Then all stream out into the open, drug themselves with talking, start arguing or love-making, and in the last glow of sunset the town, freighted with lovers two by two and loud with voices, drifts like a helmless ship into the throbbing darkness. In vain a zealous evangelist with a felt hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: ' God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.
The town infected with the plague longs for 'the least ripple of cooler air.' It looks for a sign to revert back to the ordinary. The citizens of Oran want no great apocalypse, no call for redemption. They want to go back to the pursuit of trivial objectives.
Plague, 131-32:
Next day Tarrou set to work and enrolled a first team of workers, soon to be followed by many others. However, it is not the narrator's intention to ascribe to these sanitary groups more importance than their due. Doubtless today many of our fellow citizens are apt to yield to the temptation of exagerrating the services they rendered. But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature.... Those who enrolled in the 'sanitary squads,' as they were called, had, indeed, no such great merit in doing as they did, since they knew it was the only thing to do, and the unthinkable thing would then have been not to have brought themselves to do it. These groups enabled our townsfolk to come to grips with the disease and convinced them that, now that plague was among us, it was up to them to do whatever can be done to fight it. Since plague became in this way some men's duty, it revealed itself as what it really was; that is, the concern of all.
The plague reminds the town dwellers of the need for political organization. They craft institutions to this end. They build "sanitary squads" based on voluntary membership and an altruistic spirit. Camus insists that this formation is not driven by heroism. The inhabitants of the town simply heed 'the right thing to do,' a reasonable 'concern for all.' They start taking care of the public realm.
Also consider the following remark of Jean Tarraou, the wanderer who helps Dr. Rieux to combat the plague:
What is natural is the microbe. All the rest- health, integrity, purity (if you like)- is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man... is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.
Excellence is revealed to be vigilance and the will to fight the forces of decay in nature. The fight against nature demands unfaltering vigilance and full attention.
Let us continue:
Plague 182:For the first time exiles from those they loved had no reluctance to talk freely about them, using the same words as everybody else, and regarding their deprivation from the same angle as that from which they viewed the latest statistics of the epidemic. This change was striking, since until now they had jealously withheld their personal grief from the common stock of suffering; now they accepted its inclusion. Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.
The plague thus creates an impoverished present 'here and now.' It robs people of love and friendship by making them unable to project themselves and their relationships into the future.
Plague 228:
" My brothers"- the preacher's tone showed he was nearing the conclusion of his sermon-" the love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and deaths of children........ Thus in some churches of the south of France plague victims have lain sleeping many a century under the flagstones of the chancel. and priests now speak above their tombs, and the divine message they bring to men rises from that charnel, to which, nevertheless, children have contributed their share."
The preacher comes back to reconcile fathers to the death of their children, or to God who licenses such tragedy. He summons people to a 'hard love' as if their contemporary predicament was not hard enough. 'Hard love to ward off hard pain' is the formula of his religion.
Plague 236:
Meanwhile the authorities had another cause for anxiety in the difficulty of maintaining the food-supply. Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops. The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing. Thus, whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in men's hearts.
Notably, the plague gives rise to economic inequality. Profiteers raise the prices of essential foodstuffs. The "impartial ministrations of the plague" fail to take hold.
Plague, 308:
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from the books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
The town recovers. 'Ordinary happiness' comes back. Dr. Rieux is cautious, however. He knows his science and its grim reality. His caution contrasts with the excitable preacher. Against the apologetic hard love of the priest, Camus sets the calm wisdom and responsible care of the scientist doctor. Note, however, that Dr. Rieux is out of place in Oran. Will he ever be happily adjusted to it, or to the world in general?
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