The Plague

Um, and so that was really interesting for me.

And then I f- I was sort of into French literature in college, and, uh, Albert Camus, "The Plague", there's a ch- there's a little paragraph at the very end of the story and it's talking about the doctor who's involved in the plague, and, you know, all the people in the city are celebrating because it's gone and he's, you know, he's sitting there reflecting and it says, you know, because he knows what those people don't know but could know if they read books, is that these microbes come back.

They hide out in cabinets and all, you know, lists off all these places, and they come back for basically the enlightenment of men.

And I was like, oh wow, that is really a, an interesting statement.

Well, just with respect to what has inspired me is when I was a teenager, and I was, uh, in, uh, in this sequence of my life of a quest for meaning in life, I read books that inspired me, and one of them was a physician who was volunteering for MSF as a surgeon at, at the frontline of crisis in war zones.

And the other book I read is The Plague from Albert Camus.

And I think that's probably the, the book that stayed most with me because I remember at one point the protagonist, the Dr. Rieux, is being asked, "What is driving you? Why do you keep going when your patient are dying and you don't have treatment to offer them, and you don't e- even believe in God?" And then the doctor answer, "I never got used to death.

I don't know more." And I remember telling myself that I will never trivialize death, and I will basically fight for life.

[upbeat music] In January 1941, the 28-year-old French writer Albert Camus began work on a novel about a virus that spreads uncontrollably from animals to humans and ends up destroying half the population of a representative modern town.

It was called La Peste, The Plague, eventually published in 1947 and frequently described as the greatest European novel of the second half of the 20th century.

The book, written in sparse, haunting prose, takes us through a catastrophic outbreak of a disease in the lightly fictionalized town of Oran on the Algerian coast, as seen through the eyes of the novel's hero, a Dr. Rieux, a version of Camus himself.

As the novel opens, an air of eerie normality reigns.

Proper recognition of this absurdity should not lead us to despair, pure and simple.

It should, rightly understood, be the start of a redemptive, tragicomic perspective.

Like the people of Oran before the plague, we assume that we've been granted immortality, and with this naivety come behaviors that Camus abhorred: a hardness of heart, an obsession with status, a refusal of joy and gratitude, a tendency to moralize and judge.

The people of Oran associate plague with something backward that belongs to another age.

So the government isolates a team of scientists in a multi-level underground bunker called Wildfire to basically study this extraterrestrial microorganism.

What makes Hosbrick's analysis in the Collider piece so sharp, I think, is how he links The Andromeda Strain to Albert Camus' The Plague.

Oh, right.

He highlights its intense relevance in our post-COVID reality, you know?

You feel, you, you get that feeling like where you, something is happening to you, but it's not really, and you don't know how to connect with it, and that's what that book does.

And then you take into account that he wrote this during war times, just like he wrote The Plague- After being occupied by the Nazis, you know, the play was very much an allegory, obviously, for something that, you know, affected everyone.

And I don't know, the fantastic books, I'd, I'd definitely hit those if you could.

And then that led to I had to hit William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

It held out a hope that in a world where everything had been destroyed, we can in, in some small way make a habitable place.

At least, you know, in Camus, in, in, uh, The Plague, which is his novel about World War, about Nazism.

In The Plague, we can at least, we can have friendship.

We can be humane to each other, you know, in, in some quotidian way.

Uh, it's an admirable vision, but it's pretty thin-rolled, and the open society consensus as it works its way through in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s and gets more and more intense and more flesh-eating, um, were I 21 years old today, you know, you're living in a liquid world where everything has been disintegrated.

The former is the intellectual consent we give to propositions, and the latter is the visceral affirmation that we give to matters concretely observed and deeply felt." Close quote.

And in his haunting novel, The Plague, Albert Camus wrote, quote, "Since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

The thousand dead may have about five times-- made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema.

Yes, that was how it should be done.