_The Plague_ by Albert Camus, translated by Stuart Gilbert
NY: The Modern Library, 1947, 1948
(33) The local press so lavish of news about the rats, now had nothing to say. For rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.
(34) There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
…Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
(38) "L'essentiel était de bien faire son métier."
"The thing was to do your job as it should be done.”
(43) He [Joseph Grand, government clerk and amateur novelist] was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings.
(66) Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.
(81) Yes, an element of abstraction, a divorce from reality, entered into such calamities. Still when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it.
(83) One grows out of pity when it’s useless.
NB: Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
(85) Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissues of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead.
(108) According to religion, the first half of a man’s life is an upgrade; the second goes downhill. On the descending days he has no claim, they may be snatched from him at any moment; thus he can do nothing with them. He [old asthmatic retired to count peas from one plate to another in his bed] obviously had no compunction about contradicting himself, for a few minutes later he told Tarrou that God did not exisst, since otherwise there would be no need for priests.
(120-121) The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
(149-150) “...But you’re capable of dying for an idea; one can see that right away. Well, personally, I’ve seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism; I know it’s eay and I’ve learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.”
Rieux had been watching the journalist attentively. With his eyes still on him he said quietly:
“Man isn’t an idea, Rambert.”
Rambert sprang off the bed, his face ablaze with passion.
“Man _is_ an idea, and a precious small idea, once he turns his back on love. And that’s my point; we - mankind - have lost the capacity for love. We must face that fact, doctor. Let’s wait to acquire that capacity or, if really it’s beyond us, wait for the deliverance that will come to each of us anyway, without his playing the hero. Personally, I look no farther.”
Rieux rose. He suddenly appeared very tired.
“You’re right, Rambert, quite right, and for nothing in the world would I try to dissuade you from what you’re going to do [break quarantine to be with his wife]; it seems to me absolutely right and proper. However, there’s one thing I must tell you: there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.”
“What do you mean by ‘common decency’?” Rambert’s tone was grave.
“I don’t know what it means for other people but in my case I know that it consists in doing my job."
——————————
Il ne s’agit pas d’héroïsme dans tout cela. Il s’agit d’honnêteté. C’est une idée qui peut faire rire, mais la seule façon de lutter contre la peste, c’est l’honnêteté.
"There's not about heroism in all this. It's a matter of honesty. That's an idea which can make people smile, but the only means of fighting against a plague is honesty.”
l’honnêteté - honesty, integrity
(162-163) The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextingusihable, becoming a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliverate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.
(164) 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.
(188) Showing more animation, Rieux told him was sheer nonsense; there was nothing shameful in preferring happiness.
“Certainly,” Rambert replied. “But it may be shameful to be happy by oneself."
(196-197) “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”
(217) "In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thought be diverted by anything - by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live. And these people know it only too well.”
(227) [Tarrou] Do you know that the firing-squad stands only a yard and half from the condemned man? Do you know that if the victim took two steps forward his chest would touch the rifles? Do you know that, at this short rainge, the soldiers concentrate their fire on the region of the heart and their big bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist? No, you didn’t know all that; those are things that are never spoken of. For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life.
(229) [Tarrou, whose father was a judge, against the death penalty] “That, too, is why this epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight it at your side. I know positively - yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see - that each of us has the plague within him, no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest - health, integrity, purity (if you like) is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.
NB: appamada
“Pending that release, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it others to make history. I know, too, that I’m not qualified to pass judgment on those others. There’s something lacking in my mental make-up, and its lack prevents me from being a rational murderer. So it’s a deficiency, not a superiority. But as things are, Im willing to be as I am; I’ve learned modesty. All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true. You see, I’d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak - and to act - quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track. That’s why I say there are pestilences and there are victims; no more than that. If, by making that statement, I, too, become a carrier of the plague-germ, at least I don’t do it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I’ve no great ambitions.
“I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victims’ side, so as to reduce the dmage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how one attains to the third category; in other words, to peace."
(261) But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond alll remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can be an armistice for a mother bereaved of her son or for a man who buries his friend.
(272) Whenever tempted to add his personal note to the myriad voices of the plague-stricken, he [Dr Rieux] was deterred by the thought that not one of his sufferings but was common to all the others and that in a world where sorrow is so often lonely, this was an advantage. Thus, decidedly, it was up to him to speak for all.
(278) And it was in the midst of shouts rolling against the terrace wall in massive waves that waxed in volume and duration, while cataracts of colored fire fell thicker through the darkness, that Dr Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
Notes on The First Man by Albert Camus
http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-first-man-by-albert-camus.html
NY: The Modern Library, 1947, 1948
(33) The local press so lavish of news about the rats, now had nothing to say. For rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.
(34) There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
…Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
(38) "L'essentiel était de bien faire son métier."
"The thing was to do your job as it should be done.”
(43) He [Joseph Grand, government clerk and amateur novelist] was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings.
(66) Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.
(81) Yes, an element of abstraction, a divorce from reality, entered into such calamities. Still when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it.
(83) One grows out of pity when it’s useless.
NB: Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
(85) Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissues of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead.
(108) According to religion, the first half of a man’s life is an upgrade; the second goes downhill. On the descending days he has no claim, they may be snatched from him at any moment; thus he can do nothing with them. He [old asthmatic retired to count peas from one plate to another in his bed] obviously had no compunction about contradicting himself, for a few minutes later he told Tarrou that God did not exisst, since otherwise there would be no need for priests.
(120-121) The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
(149-150) “...But you’re capable of dying for an idea; one can see that right away. Well, personally, I’ve seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism; I know it’s eay and I’ve learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.”
Rieux had been watching the journalist attentively. With his eyes still on him he said quietly:
“Man isn’t an idea, Rambert.”
Rambert sprang off the bed, his face ablaze with passion.
“Man _is_ an idea, and a precious small idea, once he turns his back on love. And that’s my point; we - mankind - have lost the capacity for love. We must face that fact, doctor. Let’s wait to acquire that capacity or, if really it’s beyond us, wait for the deliverance that will come to each of us anyway, without his playing the hero. Personally, I look no farther.”
Rieux rose. He suddenly appeared very tired.
“You’re right, Rambert, quite right, and for nothing in the world would I try to dissuade you from what you’re going to do [break quarantine to be with his wife]; it seems to me absolutely right and proper. However, there’s one thing I must tell you: there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.”
“What do you mean by ‘common decency’?” Rambert’s tone was grave.
“I don’t know what it means for other people but in my case I know that it consists in doing my job."
——————————
Il ne s’agit pas d’héroïsme dans tout cela. Il s’agit d’honnêteté. C’est une idée qui peut faire rire, mais la seule façon de lutter contre la peste, c’est l’honnêteté.
"There's not about heroism in all this. It's a matter of honesty. That's an idea which can make people smile, but the only means of fighting against a plague is honesty.”
l’honnêteté - honesty, integrity
(162-163) The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextingusihable, becoming a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliverate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.
(164) 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.
(188) Showing more animation, Rieux told him was sheer nonsense; there was nothing shameful in preferring happiness.
“Certainly,” Rambert replied. “But it may be shameful to be happy by oneself."
(196-197) “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”
(217) "In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thought be diverted by anything - by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live. And these people know it only too well.”
(227) [Tarrou] Do you know that the firing-squad stands only a yard and half from the condemned man? Do you know that if the victim took two steps forward his chest would touch the rifles? Do you know that, at this short rainge, the soldiers concentrate their fire on the region of the heart and their big bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist? No, you didn’t know all that; those are things that are never spoken of. For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life.
(229) [Tarrou, whose father was a judge, against the death penalty] “That, too, is why this epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight it at your side. I know positively - yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see - that each of us has the plague within him, no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest - health, integrity, purity (if you like) is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.
NB: appamada
“Pending that release, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it others to make history. I know, too, that I’m not qualified to pass judgment on those others. There’s something lacking in my mental make-up, and its lack prevents me from being a rational murderer. So it’s a deficiency, not a superiority. But as things are, Im willing to be as I am; I’ve learned modesty. All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true. You see, I’d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak - and to act - quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track. That’s why I say there are pestilences and there are victims; no more than that. If, by making that statement, I, too, become a carrier of the plague-germ, at least I don’t do it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I’ve no great ambitions.
“I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victims’ side, so as to reduce the dmage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how one attains to the third category; in other words, to peace."
(261) But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond alll remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can be an armistice for a mother bereaved of her son or for a man who buries his friend.
(272) Whenever tempted to add his personal note to the myriad voices of the plague-stricken, he [Dr Rieux] was deterred by the thought that not one of his sufferings but was common to all the others and that in a world where sorrow is so often lonely, this was an advantage. Thus, decidedly, it was up to him to speak for all.
(278) And it was in the midst of shouts rolling against the terrace wall in massive waves that waxed in volume and duration, while cataracts of colored fire fell thicker through the darkness, that Dr Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
Notes on The First Man by Albert Camus
http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-first-man-by-albert-camus.html
