It was only a question of time before I gave up on all the sensationalism around the world about Covid-19 and decide to re-read, Albert Camus’ La Peste/The Plague. Last time I revisited this book was when I was in Taiwan during the SARS epidemic as the story is about an epidemic where rats die of but still transmitted the bacterium Yersinia pestis via their fleas in a fictionalized Algerian town called Oran. While it is a fictional novel, the science, epidemiology and population’s behavior are factual as Camus had studied all documentation of past plague outbreaks before starting writing La Peste in 1941.
The story is indeed a familiar one. It is a tense co-habitation between science, human attitudes, political posturing, and the eventual impact of the bacterium. As I read the book, this time in digital medium on the internet, I was mesmerized by a few sentences that had escaped me in the past. For example:
“The evil that is in
the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as
malevolence, if they lack understanding. One the whole, men are more good than
bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant,
and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being
that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for
itself the right to kill.”
It almost reads like the opening paragraph of news reports we have seen in the past few months.
The original language, French, is much more to the point on this:
“Le mal qui est dans le monde vient presque
toujours de l'ignorance”
How about:
“Each of us has the
plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too,
that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe
in someone's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the
microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, and purity (if you like) – is a
product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.”
Wow. Our globe is still struggling with this. Wearing masks seems to be at the core of Camus’ statement above. But also our attitude about the disease and our responsibility.
“…in a careless moment
we breathe in someone's face and fasten the infection on him.”
In an interesting way, this attitude of carelessness, lack of vigilance and perhaps celebrated ignorance reminded me of a photo I tool at The Leopold Museum in Vienna. I never thought of it as the attitude of two people exhibiting the above attitudes. But today it does seem to describe just that.
Finally, there was a line that marvelously encapsulated the situation of populations held prisoner to an epidemic or a pandemic. It does have a profound message of hope and love shadowed by the specter of the unknown and consequent death.
« À Oran comme ailleurs, faute de temps et de
réflexion, on est bien obligé de s'aimer sans le savoir. »
This roughly translates as:
« In Oran like anywhere else, short on time and reflection, we are bound to love each other even without knowing it.”
I believe that Camus, in a single sentence, described the generic state of a population during a pandemic.
And that reminded me of another photo, shown at the outset, I took in Prescott, Arizona on a back street of a local bar. There was an anthropology I could not ignore in the posture of those mops. There was acceptance, cleaning of the mess, but also a comfort of being together through the ordeal.
November 29, 2020
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020
