It requires unfailing honesty to be unflinchingly conscious. It requires courage and revolt to lose all hope in eternity and afterlife yet decide thatIt requires unfailing honesty to be unflinchingly conscious. It requires courage and revolt to lose all hope in eternity and afterlife yet decide that this life is worth living and to not kill oneself. It asks for ceaseless inquiry to understand what a conscious human devoid of faith in God and eternity should do to be happy in the ephemeral life which has no meaning once we are dead. Camus, with his well-known courage, and very visible honesty with his thoughts (that one can see in all his works), sets on the path of explaining the absurd existence and the expected actions of humans who are conscious of it. His answer: Revolt, be free, and diversify your experiences (in a very broad sense). But at the same time, as obvious, be also aware that all actions will eventually be futile when death envelopes everything.
It is extremely difficult to lose all hope yet still exalt human life. Camus, however, valiantly took upon the task and came up with this marvelous treatise on the absurdity of life....more
One thing that makes reading different works of an author a pleasure is the repetition of their inherent beliefs in the themes of their works. This waOne thing that makes reading different works of an author a pleasure is the repetition of their inherent beliefs in the themes of their works. This was my second reading of Camus after The Stranger. Although The Stranger has an inherent tone of human indifference in the face of absurdity, The Plague is more concerned with how different people react to life's absurdity (portrayed in this case by a plague arising out of nowhere in a town and killing people ruthlessly) and what could possibly be the best way to react.
The writings of Camus are brimmed with a unique empathy that tries to reconcile human efforts towards a meaningful existence in a meaningless world. Although the narrator of The Plague states in the beginning that he will try to be as objective as possible, the elaborate accounts of the lives of the people of Oran when faced with plague turn out to be effusively humane.
So while at one point Camus speaks through the narrator, saying - "This was certainty: everyday work. The rest hang by threads and imperceptible movements; one could not dwell on it. The main thing was to do one's job well.", eventually he also gives his voice to another character, Tarrou, saying - "After all, it's silly to live only in the plague. Of course a man should fight for the victims. But if he ceases to love anything else, then what is the point in fighting?"
The essence of The Plague, that I understood, is that in this absurd life, one should not cease loving, one should not be entirely hopeless when faced with insurmountable and rather meaningless odds, one should not be forgetful and one need not give up on religion in a moment of great despair; one should rather do his work with decency while trying his best to avoid falling towards the side of pestilence (which, in the book, is also a metaphor for killing of a human, for whatever reason). This essence effuses out of the poignancy with which Camus writes about collective and individual behaviours in the face of uncertain death. For me, the one paragraph that shows the contrast in this behaviour most strongly is towards the end of the novel, when the townsfolk are celebrating the end of the plague. It goes like this:
"Pressed one against the other they all returned home, blind to the rest of the world, apparently triumphing over the plague, forgetful of the misery and of those who had also arrived by the same train but had found no one and were preparing in their homes to have confirmation of fears already born in their hearts of a long silence... ...For such people, mothers, husbands, wives and lovers, who had lost all happiness with the being who was buried in some anonymous pit or had dissolved in the pile of ashes, the plague was still there." ...more
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