La peste by Albert Camus, 1947 (The Plague)

​How many of you watched Contagion (2008) recently? About a week after the WHO declared the pandemic, I did. I wanted to see which of their dire predictions were coming to pass. For a disaster movie, it was pretty good, especially the twist at the very end.
 
For the same reason, I pulled my tattered copy of La peste off the shelf where it had sat for twenty years. Vague images were all that remained of my first reading: the dead rat in the stairwell, the old concierge with black bubonic boils in his underarms, the writer eternally reworking his first sentence…

Many more intelligent analyses have been written about this Nobel Prize-winning novel. I only want to reflect on Camus’s plague compared to our pandemic, and what wisdom we can gather from it to strengthen us in our long isolation.

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