The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to
cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with
the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is commerce,
and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, "doing
business."
The Plague
Narrator, who doesn't tell us his name,
describes the people in Oran, a French port on the Algerian
coast where he lives, Part 1. |
You must picture the consternation of our little town, hitherto
so tranquil, and now, out of the blue, shaken to its core, like
a quite healthy man who all of a sudden feels his temperature
shoot up and the blood seething like wildfire in his veins.
The Plague
Part 1. |
8,000 rats had been collected, a wave of something like panic
swept the town... the next day the Bureau informed them that
the phenomenon had abruptly ended... everyone breathed more
freely.
The Plague
Part 1. |
I can't say I really know him, but one's got to help a neighbor
hasn't one?
The Plague
Grand, Part 1. |
Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers
are concerned only with the street.
The Plague
Part 1. |
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in
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.
The Plague
Part 1. |
We tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind,
a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass
away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass
away.
The Plague
Part 1. |
They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free
so long as there are pestilences.
The Plague
Part 1. |
He knew quite well that it was plague and, needless to say,
he also knew that, were this to be officially admitted, the
authorities would be compelled to take very drastic steps. This
was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance
to face the facts.
The Plague
Part 1. |
From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of
all of us... each individual citizen had gone about his business
as usual, as far as this was possible.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Thus, for example, a feeling normally as individual as the
ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling
in which all shared alike and-together with fear-the greatest
affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all
prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory
that serves no purpose... Hostile to the past, impatient of
the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those
whom men's justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison
bars.
The Plague
Part 2. |
The plague was posting sentries at the gates and turning away
ships bound for Oran.
The Plague
Part 2. |
The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was
only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could
not be ignored, that public opinion became alive to the truth.
The Plague
Part 2. |
You can't understand. You're using the language of reason,
not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.
The Plague
Part 2. |
...the dreary struggle in progress between each man's happiness
and the abstractions of the plague.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out
and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under
no obligation to make any change in their habits, as yet. Plague
was an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as
unexpectedly as it had come.
The Plague
Part 2. |
To some the sermon simply brought home the fact that they
had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate
period of punishment. And while a good many people adapted themselves
to confinement and carried on their humdrum lives as before,
there were others who rebelled and whose one idea now was to
break loose from the prison-house.
The Plague
Part 2. |
I can understand this sort of fervor and find it not displeasing.
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-in other
words, to silence.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves
them right.
The Plague
Part 2. |
What's true of all the evils in the world is true of the 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.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in
contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance
of the truth-with a capital T. 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 goodness.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Tarrou nodded. 'Yes. But your victories will never be lasting;
that's all.' Rieux's face darkened. 'Yes, I know that. But it's
no reason for giving up the struggle.'
The Plague
Part 2. |
There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say
that two and two do make four is punished with death.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our
town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we
should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends
might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always
the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this
way or that, and there must be no bowing down... There was nothing
admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.
The Plague
Part 2. |
Invariably their epical or prize-speech verbiage jarred on
the doctor. Needless to say, he knew the sympathy was genuine
enough. But it could be expressed only in the conventional language
with which men try to express what unites them with mankind
in general; a vocabulary quite unsuited, for example, to Grand's
small daily effort.
The Plague
Part 2. |
All this time he'd practically forgotten the woman he loved,
so absorbed had he been in trying to find a rift in the walls
that cut him off from her. But at this same moment, now that
once more all ways of escape were sealed against him, he felt
his longing for her blaze up again.
The Plague
Part 2. |
I've seen enough people who die for an idea. I don't believe
in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learnt it can be murderous.
What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.
The Plague
Part 2. |
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.
The Plague
Part 2. |
No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective
destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
The Plague
Part 3. |
By the force of things, this last remnant of decorum went
by the board, and men and women were flung into the death-pits
indiscriminately. Happily this ultimate indignity synchronized
with the plague's last ravages.
The Plague
Part 3. |
So long as the epidemic lasted, there was never any lack of
men for these duties. The critical moment came just before the
outbreak touched high-water mark, and the doctor had good reason
for felling anxious. There was then a real shortage of man-power
both for the higher posts and for the rough work... But, paradoxically
enough, once the whole town was in the grip of the disease,
its very prevalence tended to make things easier.
The Plague
Part 3. |
The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence,
and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.
The Plague
Part 3. |
But, really, they were asleep already; this whole period was,
for them, no more than a long night's slumber.
The Plague
Part 3. |
The habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
The Plague
Part 3. |
Evening after evening gave its truest, mournfulest expression
to the blind endurance that had outlasted love from all our
hearts.
The Plague
Part 3. |
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