Lockdown is beginning to creep away leaving a certain reluctance to
throw oneself too ardently into former activities, despite longing to
do so. This week, we are trying to reinstate Mahjong on my terrace
and hopes are high! An attempt to re-start our Thursday evening
get-togethers at Oud Huis Amsterdam has been thwarted owing to the
immoveable barrier of the closure of the hotel which had been briefly
open.
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| Oud Huis Amsterdam, Genthof 4. |
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| Boris, recently. |
A lovely idea that I have thought of, to visit Britain and go to see
my sister on our birthday in late July, has caused me quite
unexpected anxiety about the big effort neded to travel by train from
Brugge to Bury St Edmonds. A considerable journey of at least 6-7 hours in a wretched mask amid other travellers, in a country (the U.K.) which has not so far been very successful at managing Covid 19. Incidentally I read a lovely little thumbnail of Boris by Christine Burns, a trans campaigner and author. “Johnson is a Pound Shop
Trump, slightly more acceptable and less utterly crass.” Which
rather cleverly manages to be rude about both men and cheered me up
considerably!
I am currently reading The
Plague by Albert
Camus, published in 1947, thus, I discover, joining tens of
thousands of locked-down readers during this Corona period, all fascinated by what seems to have become the defining book of Covid19. Camus
“uses a biological
epidemic to illustrate
the dilemmas of moral contagion.”
[Tony Judt. 2001] It is the story of a dreadful plague of rats in the
fictional town of Oran in French Algeria when rats emerge from the
sewers in their thousands to die with bulboes bursting. Soon humans
are similarly affected and eventually, after disbelief in pestilences
[“they only happen in
history”] causes uncomprehending, comfortable stasis and scepticism, the enormity of what is happening
hits home. The numbers afflicted rise; first slowly then
exponentially and by time the plague-arriving Spring gives way to a
sweltering summer, over 100 deaths a day are occurring. The New
Normal governs lives. Emergency measures are rushed in; city gates
and the commercial harbour are closed; sporting activities and beach
bathing are prohibited. Food shortages emerge and rationing for
basics is introduced. Plague profiteers prey on desperation and
bewilderment; sufferers are isolated; entire suburbs are locked down;
hospitals become overwhelmed and schools and other public buildings
are converted into makeshift hospitals. |
| Part of the plague of Nazism |
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| Mosque in Biskra in Algiers, similar to the fictional Oban of the novel |
Camus meditates tellingly on the
psychological and social effects of the epidemic on the townspeople.
A plague makes exiles of people in their own towns and homes;
separation, isolation, anxiety, boredom and a quotidian claustrophobic repetition
become their shared fate, seemingly without end to the sufferers. The
living cannot even bid farewell to their dead. Camus’s plague is
also a metaphor; when it was written, the plague was Nazism which had
taken over and destroyed millions in unimaginable distortions of
normal human behaviour. A character in the book, Tarrou, identifies
the plague with people’s propensity to rationalise killing others
for religious, philosophical or ideological causes. And it is in this
sense of plague that the closing words of the novel observe:
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| Camus, 1972 |
“..that the plague bacillus
never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years
and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in
bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day
would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it would
rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
But
Camus’s narrator concludes, after the unaccountable dissipation of
the plague when quarantine is lifted, gates open and families and
lovers are reunited, that, in spite of all the horrors he has
witnessed, “there
are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
He goes on to suggest that it is in ordinary virtue with people doing
what they can for each other in the face of adversity, that
extraordinary things happen to protect people from the worst
depredations heaped on them by epidemics, whether from 'natural' causes or tyrannical governments or ideologies.. "There's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency."
The
apparent prescience of The Plague considered in today’s pandemic
seems extraordinary. Camus describes so exactly our present
situation: our fears, our mystification, our boredom, our longing for
normalcy to return. He
illustrates the moral dilemmas faced by humanity when in the throes
of a plague and the
range of human behaviours in response.
But
when it was published, the plague was recognised as Nazism and its
attendant evils and Camus was widely recognised as a genius and
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. It remains one of the
most important books ever
written.
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| Triumphant post script. Mahjong this morning! |
