EIGHT LESSONS FROM "THE PLAGUE"

Safe in their wood and plaster chambers, American readers have turned to a modern classic, making The Plague a bestseller.  Although Albert Camus’ 1948 novel is not about a global pandemic, just bubonic plague in one Algerian port, it has lessons for a Second Wave America.  Here are 8 takeaways:

“. . . What we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

“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.”

“All I maintain is that on this earth 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 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. . .. Among them I can at least try to discover how one attains to the third category; in other words, to peace.”

“Opening one of these, he took from a sterilizer two masks of cotton-wool enclosed in muslin, handed one to Rambert, and told him to put it on.  The journalist asked if it was really any use.  Tarrou said no, but it inspired confidence in others.”

“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well.  It helps men to rise above themselves.  All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.”

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring to the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.  There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

“But what does it mean, the plague?  It’s life, that’s all.”