Last week, I found myself overwhelmed by the possibility that we could be looking at another year or two of pestilence. To ward off the despondence (because misery does love company) I hunkered down with a blanket and a copy of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague. I devoured it cover-to-cover for the first time in over thirty years. I previously read it back in 1986 when fears of a world-ending nuclear war between the United States and the USSR far outweighed any considerations of a rampaging virus.

Back in March and April 2020, when the first pandemic reading lists appeared online, I resisted the bandwagoning trend to read [or reread] books like The Decameron or the The Plague. It seemed hysterical and a bit premature and so hard to imagine that we could still be living this exasperating reality almost two years later. But Camus’s novel exudes true brilliance, and even those who consumed it back in early 2020 will find it all the more poignant now. One of my favorite quotes:

In this respect [the citizens of Oran] had adapted themselves to the very condition of the plague, all the more potent for its mediocrity. None of us was capable any longer of an exalted emotion; all had trite, monotonous feelings. “It’s high time it stopped,” people would say, because in times of calamity the obvious thing is to desire its end, and in fact they wanted it to end. But when making such remarks, we felt none of the passionate yearning or fierce resentment of the early phase; we merely voiced one of the few clear ideas that lingered in the twilight of our minds. The furious revolt of the first weeks had given place to a vast despondency, not to be taken for resignation, though it was nonetheless a sort of passive and provisional acquiescence.

Our fellow citizens had fallen into line, had adapted themselves, as people say, to the situation, because there was no way of doing otherwise. Naturally they retained the attitudes of sadness and suffering, but they had ceased to feel their sting. Indeed, to some, Dr. Rieux among them, this precisely was the most disheartening thing: that the habit of despair is worse than despair itself (page 180-181).