Thread by @psychunseen

Re-reading The Plague by Albert Camus and thought I'd start a pithy quotation thread.

The Plague is a 1948 work of fiction that is said to be allegorical, but some of the passages are just so similar to what we're going through now.

Which is really the beauty of literature.

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.

2) When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

3) In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else,
wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; ...

4)...therefore 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, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions.

5) Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views.

6) How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

7) Indeed, even after Dr. Rieux had admitted in his friend’s company that a handful of persons, scattered about the town, had without warning died of plague, the danger still remained fantastically unreal.

8) "When a microbe," Rieux said, "after a short intermission can quadruple in three days’ time the volume of the spleen, can swell the mesenteric ganglia to the size of an orange and give them the consistency of gruel, a policy of wait-and-see is, to say the least of it, unwise."

9) "Judging by the rapidity with which the disease is spreading, it may well, unless we can stop it, kill off half the town before two months are out. That being so... The important thing is to prevent its killing off half the population of this town."

10) Richard said it was a mistake to paint too gloomy a picture, and, moreover, the disease hadn’t been proved to be contagious; indeed, relatives of his patients, living under the same roof, had escaped it.

11) “But others have died,” Rieux observed. “And obviously contagion is never absolute... It’s not a question of painting too black a picture. It’s a question of taking precautions.”

12) “If we don’t make that declaration,” Rieux said, “there’s
a risk that half the population may be wiped out... My point is that we should not act as if there were no
likelihood that half the population would be wiped out;
for then it would be.”

13) ...once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life.

14) 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.

15) One of the most striking consequences of the closing of the gates was, in fact, this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared for it. Mothers and children, lovers, husbands and wives, who had a few days previously taken it for granted...

16) ...that their parting would be a short one, who had kissed one another good-by on the platform and exchanged a few trival remarks, sure as they were of seeing one another again after a few days or, at most, a few weeks, duped by our blind human faith in the near future...

17) ...and little if at all diverted from their normal interests by this leave-taking — all these people found themselves, without the least warning, hopelessly cut off, prevented from seeing one another again, or even communicating with one another.

18) It might indeed be said that the first effect of this brutal visitation was to compel our townspeople to act as if they had no feelings as individuals.

19) ...the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their
movements to the same dull round inside the town, and
throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories. For in their aimless walks...

20) ..they kept on coming back to the same streets and usually, owing to the smallness of the town, these were streets in which, in happier days, they had walked with those who now were absent. |

Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile.

21) It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile — that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.

22) It is noteworthy that our townspeople very quickly desisted, even in public, from a habit one might have expected them to form — that of trying to figure out the probable duration of their exile. The reason was this:

23) ...when the most pessimistic had fixed it at, say, six months; ... an article in a newspaper, a vague suspicion, or a flash of foresight would suggest that, after all, there was no reason why the epidemic shouldn’t last more than six months; why not a year, or even more?

24) At such moments the collapse of their courage, will-
power, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they
could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen.

25) "Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. ...Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths...

26) ...they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

27) Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility.

28) Nevertheless — and this point is most important — however bitter their distress and however heavy their hearts, for all their emptiness, it can be truly said of these exiles that in the early period of the plague they could account themselves privileged.

29) Nobody as yet had really acknowledged to himself what the disease connoted. Most people were chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests.

30) They were worried and irritated — but these are not feelings with which to confront plague. Their first reaction, for instance, was to abuse the authorities. The Prefect’s riposte to criticisms echoed by the press... was somewhat unexpected.

31) ...the bare statement that three hundred and two deaths had taken place in the third week of plague failed to strike their imagination. For one thing, all the three hundred and two deaths might not have been due to plague.

32) 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. ...Yet they were still not sensational enough to prevent our townsfolk, perturbed though they were...

33) ...from persisting in the idea that what was happening was a sort of accident, disagreeable enough, but certainly of a temporary order.

So they went on strolling about the town as usual and sit-
ting at the tables on cafe terraces.

34) Cottard told the story of a grocer in his street who had laid by masses of canned provisions with the idea of selling them later on at a big profit.

35) When the ambulance men came to fetch him he had several dozen cans of meat under his bed. “He died in the hospital. There’s no money in plague, that’s sure.”

36) ...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.

37) For the most part they were men with well-defined and sound ideas on everything concerning exports, banking, the fruit or wine trade; men of proved ability in handling problems relating to insurance, the interpretation of ill-drawn contracts, and the like;...

38) ...of high qualifications and evident good intentions. That, in fact, was what struck one most — the excellence of their intentions. But as regards plague their competence was practically nil.

39) peppermint lozenges had vanished from the drugstores, because there was a popular belief that when sucking them you were proof against contagion.

40) 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...

41) ...their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation.

42) And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.

43) ...the most striking feature of our funerals was their speed. Formalities had been whittled down, and, generally speaking, all elaborate ceremonial suppressed. The plague victim died away from his family...

44) ...and the customary vigil beside the dead body was forbidden, with the result that a person dying in the evening spent the night alone, and those who died in the daytime were promptly buried.