• PLAGUES and wars always find us unprepared.

October 2021. Time now to reflect on some messages from Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) via the narrator Dr Bernard Rieux.

He challenges the locals’ petty obsession with status and the tendency to moralise and judge (like the priest Panaloux who deduces the plague is God’s punishment for depravity).

There is no escape from human vulnerabilities, even susceptibility to sudden death, which can render life meaningless or absurd.

Life may be a hospice, not a hospital, suffering randomly distributed.

Dr Rieux concludes that the only way one confronts a plague is with decency and doing one’s job to help.

The bacillus never dies or vanishes but remains dormant.

MIKE BOR
St George’s Fields, W2