Some might say I’m a glutton for punishment for reading a book about a plague during a plague. I don’t disagree. At times The Plague by Albert Camus hit too close to home, especially when it described the grief of losing loved ones and the pain of those unwillingly separated from their lovers and families. But, all that being said, The Plague is a marvelous and inspiring little book and I encourage everyone to read it before the pandemic is over. After all, our shared pandemic mindset may disappear quite abruptly when life returns to some version of normalcy. (I wouldn’t be upset if it did!).
Throughout the book, I was inspired by the unique characters, the interesting storytelling technique, and the continuous moral discussion around what it means to do good in the world during times of great difficulty. Although the rest of this reflection may come across as gloomy, this is an inspiring story if you choose to read it that way. The story of courageous men and women confronting a slow moving, inevitable disaster. It is heartwarming to read about people doing what is right and refreshing to see human and societal behavior that I have seen during the pandemic described with so much insight and humanity.
There are a few sentences of the book that have lingered with me, but there is one that I just can’t stop thinking about. About a third of the way into the book, the narrator reflects on the way interpersonal relationships have changed during the pandemic. He reflects:
If, by some chance, one of us tried to unburden himself or to say something about his feelings, the reply he got, whatever it might be, wounded his feelings. And then it dawned on him that he and the man with him weren’t talking about the same thing. For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotions a grief that is traded on the marketplace, mass-produced.... This was true of those at least for whom silence was unbearable, and since the others could not find the truly expressive word, they resigned themselves to using the current coin of language, the commonplaces of plain narrative, of anecdote, and of their daily paper. So in these cases, too, even the sincerest grief has to make do with the set phrases of ordinary conversation. (
This paragraph is so insightful and so true. When I think about the world around me, it’s as hard to describe everything that’s changed since the beginning of the quarantine as it is to describe my tenuous state of mind: constantly mourning my old life and lifestyle with no indication of when or if it will return. And yet, despite the extraordinary circumstances, we‘re left to describe it with the same vocabulary we’ve always had; we are challenged to describe new things with the same old words. As Camus writes, “the current coin of language.”
For me, even the word “unprecedented” doesn’t feel sufficiently unknown, revolutionary, or chaotic enough to describe the groundbreaking world in which we find ourselves living. In the past, I might have used that word to describe a new movie, a remarkable piece of architecture, or even the menu at a phenomenal restaurant. No more: without a word to surpass “unprecedented,” I use it sparingly so it can maintain a little of its force. I need “unprecedented” to mean something so I can continue using it to mentally wrap my head around the world. Do we need to make up more words? Or is the challenge to describe the indescribable an eternal human preoccupation?
The consequence of using everyday language to describe our lives and the state of the world is an incapacity to express our full, deep selves. This leaves us feeling ever more separated from one another. In this passage, Camus writes about how one person’s great emotion is compressed and commodified when communicated through our language. I think about the now-pervasive COVID commercials, many of which speak about lofty themes of family, unity, and healing. They use the same words of courage and grief that I use. And so when I use those words, they are necessarily filtered through this great cultural lens before they can be understood by others. Which renders my unique feelings into commonplace experience.
I know this is not a new problem. The act of communication between human beings has always been fraught. Other people are often unknowable. But each of our individual experiences feel so deeply eccentric, so strange, so new. It feels like the division of our language is worse than ever before. And with that, I take my mission for the next few weeks. Like I attempt to do with this blog, I will try my hardest to communicate myself and my feelings with simple language. I will try my hardest to make my needs easy to understand. And I will try my hardest to be receptive to all kinds of communication in return - to maintain my relationships and spark new ones. After all, I firmly believe our sharing is what keeps us human.
Camus - Photo from the New Yorker
P.S. Only after finishing the book and reading a few scholarly pieces did I realize that the “plague” in The Plague is not only a narrative about an epidemic but also an extended metaphor for the experience of living under Fascism. I am not embarrassed to say I completely missed that angle. To me, the themes of culture, courage, and doing good still ring true. And if anything, it makes me more excited to give the book another read in a future outside of the pandemic. The moral? Give this book a shot - it will reward you with many layers!