Fragments #4 - Camus - The Plague

How then to live life well when the humiliations of human suffering lie in wait for us? By drifting from day to day in numbing routines? Not for Camus. And I still agree with him. By escaping into hollow distractions rather than be face to face with the harsh realities of human suffering? Not for Camus. And I still agree with him. By trusting religious or philosophical interpretations of life experiences that collapse whenever pressed by the intensity of human suffering? Not for Camus. And I still agree with him. By maintaining an idealist confidence in the exchange of ideas and an optimism about the future that inflate unsullied by the absurdity of human suffering? Not for Camus. And I still agree with him. By shriveling into a passionless cynic who indifferently gainsays any resolve to rebel against the sources of unspeakable human suffering? Not for Camus. And I still agree with him.

Fragments #3 - Camus - The Plague

I recoiled from the militant Jesuit priest Father Paneloux, an Augustinian scholar celebrated even among those indifferent to religion for his study of ancient inscriptions and for his trouncing series of public lectures on present-day individualism. The ecclesiastical authorities, toward the end of the first month of plague, organized a Week of Prayer that culminated with a sermon by the fiery tempered Paneloux. The large audiences, alarmed, but far from desperate, hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence. With a violent storm pelting the cathedral, the stocky bespectacled Paneloux leaned on the edge of the pulpit and launched at the congregation the gist of his discourse in clear, emphatic tones: “Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it.” No one could miss his point – “The just man need have no fear, but the evildoer has good cause to tremble. For plague is the flail of God and the world His threshing floor. . . . Maybe at this very moment his finger is pointing to your door. . . . No earthly power, nay, not even – mark me well – the vaunted might of human science can avail you to avert that hand once it is stretched toward you. Some, including the Othon boy’s father, found Paneloux’s arguments irrefutable. Some felt sentenced. Some panicked. Some rebelled. Tarrou added to his diary – “At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, i.e., to silence.” Rieux confessed to Tarrou, “I’ve seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. . . . Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come in contact with death. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.” At Tarrou’s invitation, Paneloux joined the sanitation squads. He spent his entire time in hospitals and places where he came in contact with plague . . . in the forefront of the fight. . . . Paneloux leaned against the wall by the Othon boy’s bedside, his face drawn in grief. The child’s death wail fluttered out into silence as Paneloux sank to his knees repeating in vain, “My God, spare this child!” They had already seen children die, but they had never yet watched a child’s agony minute by minute. They had never had to witness over so long a period the death throes of an innocent child. Once outside, Rieux turned toward Paneloux, “There are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.” Paneloux said in a low voice, “I understand. That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.” Rieux gazed at him, then shook his head, “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I will refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” Paneloux had been working on an essay entitled “Is a Priest Justified in Consulting a Doctor?” Humbled by working so close to death, he presented the thesis in a second sermon – “My brethren, a time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything? . . . The love of God is a hard love. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children. It alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours. That is the hard lesson I would share with you today. That is the faith, cruel in men’s eyes and crucial in God’s, which we must ever strive to compass.” Paneloux soon after began to feel run-down and, though without the specific symptoms of plague, died bedridden gazing at the crucifix that hung above the head of his bed.
I agonized with the short, square-shouldered young journalist Raymond Rambert, on assignment for a Paris newspaper to report on the sanitary conditions prevailing among Oran’s Arab population. When Rieux informed him about the extraordinary number of dead rats that were being found, he exclaimed, “Ah! That certainly interests me.” Rambert soon discovered the story was far bigger than he could have imagined. The officials’ decision to quarantine the city trapped him, one of the many travelers caught by the plague and forced to stay where they were cut off from the person with whom they wanted to be and from their homes as well. Pained by separation from his fiancé, Rambert exclaimed, “But confound it, I don’t belong here!” Longing for happiness and baffled by fruitless interviews with officials, he turned to the criminal element in search of a way to sneak past the guarded gates. Wrestling with his determination to escape over against Tarrou’s commitment to the sanitation squads, he listened to the weary Rieux’s reminder, “There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is common decency.” Still fighting to prevent the plague from besting him, Rambert gazed at Rieux and Tarrou, “You two. I suppose you’ve nothing to lose in all this. It’s easier, that way, to be on the side of the angels.” Draining his glass, Rieux said to Tarrou, “Come along. We’ve work to do.” As they walked away, Tarrou turned and looked at Rambert, “I suppose you don’t know that Rieux’s wife is in a sanatorium a hundred miles or so away.” The next day, still fancying he had the power of choice, Rambert called the doctor, “Would you agree to my working with you until I find some way of getting out of the town?” “Certainly, Rambert. Thanks.” When the chance to escape came, Rambert chose to stay, explaining to Rieux, “Until now I always felt a stranger in this town and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.” . . . Rambert’s fiancé arrived on one of the first trains to enter Oran on the day the city gates were reopened. Rambert felt a nervous tremor at the thought that soon he would have to confront a love and a devotion that the plague had slowly refined to a pale abstraction. If only he could put the clock back and be once more the man who, at the outbreak of the epidemic, had had only one thought and one desire: to escape and return to the woman he loved! But that, he knew, was out of the question now; he had changed too greatly. The plague had forced on him a detachment which, try as he might, he couldn’t think away and which like a formless fear haunted his mind. He hadn’t had time to pull himself together. Happiness was bearing down on him full speed, the event outrunning expectation. . . . He hadn’t time to see that form running toward him; already she had flung herself upon his breast. And with his arms locked around her, pressing to his shoulder the head of which he saw only the familiar hair, he let his tears flow freely, unknowing if they rose from present joy or from sorrow too long repressed; aware only that they would prevent his making sure if the face buried in the hollow of his shoulder was the face of which he had dreamed so often or, instead, a stranger’s face. For the moment, he wished to behave like all those others around him who believed, or made believe, that plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts.

Fragments #2 - Camus - The Plague

I appreciated the broad-shouldered Dr. Bernard Rieux, an unassuming 35-year-old physician given to absentmindedness whose demonstrated loyalty to his poorer and most at-risk patients oriented me to recognize medical students, residents, and practicing physicians who still held to the intent to be humane and to exercise a social conscience. Soon after the morning he stepped on something soft – a dead rat – Rieux, torn between conflicting fears and confidence, was the first among his colleagues to utter the word ‘plague’. It took city officials several meetings to be convinced to act. Once the epidemic was diagnosed, the patient had to be evacuated forthwith. Then began a tussle with the family, who knew they would not see the sick one again until dead or cured. “Have some pity, Doctor!” – Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes renewed again and again. . . . He needed no longer steel himself against pity. One grows out of pity when it’s useless. . . . He admitted to a close friend, “I have no idea what’s awaiting me or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment, I know this – there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they’ll think things over and so shall I. But what’s wanted now is to make them well. I defend them as best I can. Against whom? I haven’t a notion. When I entered this profession, I did it because it was particularly difficult for a workman’s son like myself. And then I had to see people die. I saw that I could never get hardened to it.” At midnight before going to bed, Rieux sometimes turned on the radio to hear well-meaning speakers call out fervently to the quarantined city, “Oran, Oran, we’re with you!” But he reminded himself, “They are too remote.” To diagnose, to register, and then to condemn -- he was not with the patient to save life; he was there to order the patient’s evacuation. “You haven’t a heart!” a woman once told him. . . . Had he not been so exhausted, had his senses been sharper, the odor of death might have touched his sentiments. . . . “A man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.” . . . As the survivors celebrated the plague’s receding after killing thousands, Rieux chose instead to draft a chronicle so that he would not be among those who hold their peace but would bear witness for the plague stricken victims. The mothers, husbands, wives, and lovers who had lost all joy now that the loved one lay under a layer of quicklime in a death-pit or was a mere handful of indistinctive ashes in a gray mound -- who gave a thought to these lonely mourners? Rieux knew what the jubilant crowds did not know -- that the plague bides its time dormant in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves until rousing its rats again to send them forth to die in a happy city.
I returned again and again to the good-humored but estranged son of a successful prosecuting attorney Jean Tarrou, a youngish traveler of private means new to Oran who seemed an addict of all normal pleasures without being their slave. A faithful diarist given to understatement, he had a habit of observing events and people through the wrong end of a telescope. He set himself to recording the history of what the normal historian passes over . . . seemingly trivial details which yet have their importance. He struck up a friendship with Rieux, accompanying him on home visits and giving him a safe conversation partner. Sitting across from Rieux at his office desk, Tarrou spoke frankly, “In a fortnight, or a month at most, you’ll serve no purpose here. Things will have got out of hand.” He continued as Rieux nodded, “The sanitary department is inefficient – understaffed, for one thing – and you’re worked off your feet. . . . Why not call for voluntary help? . . . I’ve drawn up a plan for voluntary groups of helpers. Get me empowered to try out my plan. . . . I have friends in many walks of life; they’ll form a nucleus to start from. And, of course, I’ll take part in it myself.” Rieux replied, “I need hardly tell you that I accept your suggestion most gladly. But I take it you know that such work of this kind may prove fatal to the worker.” . . . Tarrou continued to make detailed journal entries, though working long hours with the sanitation squads and shielding the overworked Rieux left him thinner, his eyes and features blurred with fatigue, his shoulders sagged. . . . He understood the plague as metaphor as well as physical horror. As he explained to Rieux, “I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it or feel at ease in that condition. . . . I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. . . . All I maintain is that there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. . . . I came to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak – and to act – quite clearly. . . . I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim’s side, so as to reduce the damage done.” Two days after an official communiqué fed optimism that the plague was ending, Tarrou’s diary ended with shaky handwriting – “Feeling very tired tonight.” Ganglia swelled under his burning skin. There was a rumbling in his chest. Rieux could only watch his friend’s struggle. He had before him only a mask-like face, inert, from which the smile had gone forever. This human form, his friend’s, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck. He could only stand, unavailing, on the shore, empty-handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless. And thus, when the end came with a short hollow groan, the tears that blinded Rieux’s eyes were tears of impotence. Tarrou had “lost the match”, as he put it. But he endured the experience without flinching and lucid. Rieux received word the next morning of his own wife’s death, a tuberculosis victim who died alone in a sanitarium miles from the quarantined city.

Fragments #1 - Camus - The Plague

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.