Albert Camus is one of my favorite authors. His novel “The Plague” was written in 1947 and is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels of his era if not of all time. It is about a plague which decimated the population the French Algerian city of Oran.
I first became familiar with Camus when I took existentialism in the last semester of my senior college. I found his work far more accessible and personally resonating than most of his fellow existentialists. My mother had died two years of brain cancer at the age of 44 before and I was struggling with many of the same questions about the meaning of life which Camus and the other existentialists addressed.
Here’s a new 10 minute review from The School of Life.
It has compelling images which illustrate the points being made.
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There are at this writing 1100 comments on the YouTube page many of 30 or so which I read are very insightful.
If you’d rather read about the novel instead of watching the video or want a supplement to the video, here’s a review, Camus and the Plague.
Excerpts:
Camus was not writing about one plague in particular, nor was this narrowly, as has sometimes been suggested, a metaphoric tale about the recent Nazi occupation of France. Camus was drawn to his theme because, in his philosophy, we are all – unbeknownst to us – already living through a plague: that is a widespread, silent, invisible disease that may kill any of us at any time and destroy the lives we assumed were solid. The actual historical incidents we call plagues are merely concentrations of a universal precondition, they are dramatic instances of a perpetual rule: that we are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated, by a bacillus, an accident or the actions of our fellow humans. Our exposure to plague is at the heart of Camus’s view that our lives are fundamentally on the edge of what he termed ‘the absurd’.
Proper recognition of this absurdity should not lead us to despair pure and simple. It should – rightly understood – be the start of a redemptive tragi-comic perspective. Like the people of Oran before the plague, we assume that we have been granted immortality and with this naivety come behaviours that Camus abhorred: a hardness of heart, an obsession with status, a refusal of joy and gratitude, a tendency to moralise and judge.
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Camus speaks to us in our own times not because he was a magical seer who could intimate what the best epidemiologists could not, but because he correctly sized up human nature and knew about a fundamental and absurd vulnerability in us that we cannot usually bear to remember. In the words of one of his characters, Camus knew, as we do not, that ‘everyone has inside it himself this plague, because no one in the world, no one, can ever be immune.’
Here’s the free audiobook. It is 10 hours long.
You may want to enlarge and center the text because it is a small font.