We cannot be reminded too often that where one thinks about spirituality, ethics, theology weighs heavily on what one concludes. It is one thing to think about such matters while sitting in a dorm room, in an office, in a library, in a restaurant, in a classroom, in front of a beautiful sunset, . . . . It is quite another to think about such matters while sitting in a city hospital emergency room, in an unemployment office waiting room, in a juvenile courtroom, in the middle of a group of terribly abused children, in an AIDS clinic, . . . . It is still another to think about such matters while living and working in those settings. I know. For many years, I had done my thinking while sitting in dorm rooms, in offices, in libraries, in restaurants, in classrooms, in front of nature’s beauty . . . while living and working at a safe distance from the nauseating realities borne by so many. But no longer by the time I began teaching the ‘Human Suffering’ graduate course (1980). Instead, I began preparing my lectures and assessing my students’ essays while volunteering at St. Jude Children’s Hospital, while attending support group meetings for victims of neurological diseases, while participating in a childcare service for parents with disabled children, while assisting in the creation of a gynecology clinic for women with mental disabilities, while being introduced to the breadth and depth of human suffering present day and night at Memphis’ Charity Hospital.
It was then that I first read The Plague. The 1947 novel rang true in the places I found myself. It set the table for my deepest questions and for my protest against the temptations to become reconciled to the extremities of human suffering.
Albert Camus (1913-60) – athlete, actor, playwright, journalist, novelist, essayist – received in 1957 the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was raised in Algerian poverty, his father a World War I casualty. Tuberculosis imposed on him at age seventeen the ordeal of a protracted illness. Sifting carefully for many years through the ideas of celebrated European thinkers sharpened his resolve to protest against every idea, every value, every thought system that depended on deceitful rhetoric or denied “the vast indifference of the sky”. Camus and his wife Francine first visited the Algerian port city Oran in 1939 -- he a newspaper reporter focused on the living conditions of North African Arabs and she a mathematics teacher. They returned in 1941, the year he joined the French Resistance “by the automatic reflex of humiliated honor” and began writing The Plague. When the Allies invaded North Africa in 1942, Camus was staying at a boarding house owned by his wife’s cousin in the mountains of Central France recovering from yet another tuberculosis attack. His wife had returned to Oran for the beginning of the school term. The tightened German occupation kept them from reuniting until the liberation of France.
Camus never wavered from the premise that the “ambition which should be that of all writers is to bear witness and shout . . . for those who, like we, are enslaved.” He did so most forcefully in The Plague, an allegory about Oran, a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern. (Italics indicate quotations from the novel.) The townsfolk were wrapped up in themselves. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business’. They disbelieved in pestilences. City officials and the cultural elite remained blind to the pending devastation implicit in the report of rats dying in the streets, blind until the human victims ceased to be isolated to slum dwellers. Cornered, irritated, exiled, abandoned, shaken to the core – the quarantined citizens and visitors came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose. They finally saw that plague was the business of them all. Hope focused on the attempt of medical researchers to create a serum. The test recipient – Philippe Othon, the young son of the police magistrate. Philippe nonetheless died in excruciating pain.
How does one feel, live, think when defenseless against plague? Four characters drew me into the story.
It was then that I first read The Plague. The 1947 novel rang true in the places I found myself. It set the table for my deepest questions and for my protest against the temptations to become reconciled to the extremities of human suffering.
Albert Camus (1913-60) – athlete, actor, playwright, journalist, novelist, essayist – received in 1957 the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was raised in Algerian poverty, his father a World War I casualty. Tuberculosis imposed on him at age seventeen the ordeal of a protracted illness. Sifting carefully for many years through the ideas of celebrated European thinkers sharpened his resolve to protest against every idea, every value, every thought system that depended on deceitful rhetoric or denied “the vast indifference of the sky”. Camus and his wife Francine first visited the Algerian port city Oran in 1939 -- he a newspaper reporter focused on the living conditions of North African Arabs and she a mathematics teacher. They returned in 1941, the year he joined the French Resistance “by the automatic reflex of humiliated honor” and began writing The Plague. When the Allies invaded North Africa in 1942, Camus was staying at a boarding house owned by his wife’s cousin in the mountains of Central France recovering from yet another tuberculosis attack. His wife had returned to Oran for the beginning of the school term. The tightened German occupation kept them from reuniting until the liberation of France.
Camus never wavered from the premise that the “ambition which should be that of all writers is to bear witness and shout . . . for those who, like we, are enslaved.” He did so most forcefully in The Plague, an allegory about Oran, a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern. (Italics indicate quotations from the novel.) The townsfolk were wrapped up in themselves. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business’. They disbelieved in pestilences. City officials and the cultural elite remained blind to the pending devastation implicit in the report of rats dying in the streets, blind until the human victims ceased to be isolated to slum dwellers. Cornered, irritated, exiled, abandoned, shaken to the core – the quarantined citizens and visitors came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose. They finally saw that plague was the business of them all. Hope focused on the attempt of medical researchers to create a serum. The test recipient – Philippe Othon, the young son of the police magistrate. Philippe nonetheless died in excruciating pain.
How does one feel, live, think when defenseless against plague? Four characters drew me into the story.
