"The Plague" is one of Camus's most important masterpieces, through the description of a city called Oran in North Africa after the outbreak of the plague in the face of the story of a large number of people represented by the protagonist Dr. Rieux in the face of the plague, vividly showing those who dare to face the bleak life, have the fearless spirit of "knowing what cannot be done", do not despair or despair, rise up in the absurdity, and adhere to the great liberal humanitarian spirit of truth and justice in despair.
The novel tells the story of a plague in Oran, Algeria, and the sudden plague is overwhelming. Politicians are arrogant and ignorant, cover up their mistakes, and even want to use disasters for their benefit; The little people who used to live a depressed life, with the help of the black market, brought all kinds of forbidden goods to the people, and suddenly became a man of the year in the city; The common people are panicked, helpless, selfish and greedy, and just live a decadent life every day.
The plague city was locked down, and no one could enter or leave freely. The people trapped in the city think about their relatives and friends who live outside the city. A journalist who was on a business trip to the city was forced to live without relatives and friends, hoping to kill time by joining a volunteer team. The main character, Dr. Rieux, comes to the rescue of the patient at this time, and becomes a close friend with some of his colleagues. However, his wife is far away in a nursing home, and her fate is uncertain.
Eventually, the plague receded, but although the noise of gongs and drums diluted the fear of disease, the people of Orlan never forgot the dream demons that the plague had brought them.
The following is an excerpt from Camus's The Plague:
1. Getting used to despair is worse than despair itself.
2. Evil in the world is almost always caused by ignorance. Uninformed good intentions do just as much damage as sin. People are always more good than bad, and the real problem is not here. But there is a difference in the degree of ignorance of people, and this is the so-called distinction between virtue and evil, and the most hopelessly evil is the ignorance of ignorance, which thinks that it knows everything, and therefore thinks that it has the right to kill. The soul of a murderer is blind, and if there is no insight, there is no true goodness and noble charity.
3. Placing too much emphasis on noble deeds can turn into an indirect but powerful praise of sin. For that would lead one to suspect that noble deeds are so valuable only because they are scarce like morning stars, that ruthlessness and indifference are the more frequent motivators of human behavior.
4. The easiest way to get to know a city is to ask how its people work, how they love each other, and how they die.
5. The sense of emptiness that always exists in the depths of our hearts is indeed a sense of exile, a clear emotion, an anxious arrow of memory, an absurd delusion, either a delusion of turning back the years or, on the contrary, of the flight of time. Sometimes we let ourselves revel in the realm of fantasy, imagining ourselves happily waiting for the doorbell of a loved one to come back or the familiar sound of footsteps on the stairs, or we deliberately forget about the train and rush home to wait for our loved ones when the passengers who usually come by evening express train should arrive home.
6. Without insight, there can be no true goodness and noble love.
7. There is nothing in the world that is worth giving up what people love for the sake of it. However, for some reason, I myself, like you, have abandoned what I love.
8. In the face of great calamity, the future has become an unreachable shore, illusory. In a city without a future, people can only give up patience and reserve to satisfy their various desires. Such a post-apocalyptic carnival scene is inevitable.
9. In this situation of extreme loneliness, at last no one can count on the neighbors to help them, and everyone is left alone with a lot of preoccupations. If one of us occasionally tries to talk to someone and express some emotion, then no matter what the other person answers, the result will hurt his heart nine times out of ten. He will find that there is no common language between him and the person he is talking to. One was indeed speaking the language of his thoughts and pains for several days, and he wanted to express the image of being tormented by waiting and passion for a long time, while the other thought that he was only talking about the same cliché grumbling, of the anguish that abounded, of the sadness that everyone has.
10. When people feel that sympathy is useless, they get tired of it.
11. I am interested in: to live for what is loved, to die for what is loved.
12. This loveless world is like the world of the dead, and one day people will get tired of prison, work, and courage, and will find a lovely face and a tender heart.
13. He who has a job does it with the same gait as the plague: cautious and silent. Everyone became less arrogant and impatient. For the first time, when the parting person talks about the person who is not in front of him, he is no longer happy. They used the same language and treated their parting situations with the same attitude towards the statistics on the pandemic. Before, they had never agreed to confuse their troubles with the common misfortunes of the city, and now they had accepted to mix them together. Having lost memories of the past, no hope for the future, they have found themselves in the reality of the present. Honestly, in their eyes, everything has become a matter of immediate importance. It must be said that the plague has taken love and even friendship away from everyone, because love must have some future meaning, but at this time, there is nothing for everyone except the present moment.
14. "The plague lurks in every man, for, no man, yes, no man in the world is immune from it. I also know that I have to be self-disciplined and never slack off, otherwise, if I am not careful, I may breathe into someone's face and pass on the plague to others."
15. However, if you only know something, remember something, but do not get what you want, then how difficult it will be to live and "win"! Probably this is how Taru lived, and he realized that a life without illusions was empty. If there is no hope, there will be no peace of mind. Taru believes that man has no right to sentence anyone, but he also knows that no one can restrain himself from sentencing others, and even the victim himself is sometimes the executioner, so he lives in pain and conflict, and never lives in hope. Is it for this reason that he wants to be a saint, that he wants to find peace by helping others?
16. Sometimes we let ourselves revel in the realm of fantasy, imagining ourselves happily waiting for the doorbell of our loved ones to come back or the familiar sound of footsteps on the stairs, or we deliberately forget about the train blockage, and rush home to wait for our loved ones when the usual passengers who come by evening express train should arrive at home. Of course, these games don't last, and knowing that the train will always come when the train won't work, we understand that our separation from our loved ones is destined to last, and that we must try to arrange everything we have to get through this time. In short, we have been in captivity again, and we can only miss the past. Even if a few of us hope for the future, when they are traumatized by the ultimate trauma of those who believe in illusions, they quickly and try to give up that luxury.
17. They said, "This is the plague! We are the ones who have experienced the plague! "They almost asked for a medal. But what is the plague? It's just life.
18. There is always something that threatens joy, because what is not visible to these elated crowds, he can see at a glance. He knew that one would read these words in the book: the plague bacillus never dies, it can sleep in furniture and clothes for decades, it can wait patiently in rooms, cellars, suitcases, handkerchiefs, and piles of waste paper, and maybe one day, when bad luck befalls the people, or another lesson, the plague god will once again unleash its rat swarm, and drive them to choose a happy city as their burial place.
19. Being a plague patient is tiring. But if you don't want to be a plague patient, it's even more tiring. Because of this, everyone seems tired. Because today everyone is a little infected with the plague. But it is also because of this that some people who do not want to be plague patients anymore feel exhausted, and for them there is nothing but death that can free them from this fatigue.
20. A person's death is only valued in the presence of others, so that 100 million corpses scattered throughout the long history are only a wisp of smoke in the imagination.
21. True generosity for the future is to give everything to the present.
22. Question: What should I do if I don't waste my time? Answer: Experience it over a long period of time. Methods: Sit in an uncomfortable chair in the dentist's waiting room for a few full days; Spend Sunday afternoons on the balcony of your own home; Listen to presentations made in a language you don't understand; To travel on the farthest and most inconvenient railway line, of course, you have to stand; Queue up in front of the theater box office and don't get a ticket, etc.
23. The rest, such as health, integrity and purity, may be said to come from the action of the will, an action of the will that should never stop. The upright person, that is, the person who hardly transmits the disease to anyone, is always careful and as undistracted as possible. And in order to never be distracted, you have to have willpower, you have to be in a state of tension!
24. All those who are transcendent, those who yearn for something that even they themselves cannot say, have not found anything that is in accordance with their heart's desire. It was as if Taru had sought the kind of unwanted peace he had once spoken, but he had only obtained it through death, and that peace had been of no use to him by then. In the afterglow of the setting sun, Rieux saw some people, hugging each other tightly at the door of their homes, gazing passionately at each other; These people get what they aspire to because what they ask for is the only thing they can reach.
25. Even if the world is as desolate as the small city of Oran, which is covered by a plague, as long as there is a glimmer of warmth, despair will not consume people's hearts.
26. We all know, consciously or unconsciously, that any love can be perfected, even though we are often unashamedly willing to keep our love at a mediocre level. But in our memories, we are more demanding of ourselves.
27. How can one imagine a city without pigeons, trees, or gardens? How can one imagine that there is no bird spreading its wings or no rustle of leaves, in short, it is a featureless place? In this city, the change of seasons can only be seen by looking at the sky. Only that fresh air, baskets of flowers brought in by hawkers from the suburbs, brought the message of spring, which here is sold at the market. In the summer, the scorching sun scorched the excessively dry houses, covering the walls with a layer of gray dust, and people could not live without lowering the blinds. But in the fall, it rained heavily and the city was covered with mud. It wasn't until winter came that the weather cleared.
28. In a different environment, we, the citizens, would be looking for refuge in the midst of pleasure and busyness. But at this moment, the plague left them with nothing to do, and they had to go about the gloomy city, day after day indulging in frustrating memories, for as they wandered aimlessly through the little city, they always walked down a few streets, and most of them the same streets they had walked with their relatives who were no longer with them at the previous time.
29. If one of us occasionally wants to make friends with someone or talk about his feelings, there is a good chance that he will be upset by the response of the other person, because he will find that the person with whom he is talking is looking at him. What he himself expressed was indeed what he had condensed in his thoughts and pains day after day, and what he wanted to convey to the other party was also the scene of long-term waiting and bitter love. The other party, on the contrary, thinks that his feelings are all clichés, his pain and admiration are everywhere, and his melancholy is common to everyone.
30. He wanted to be himself again at the beginning of the plague, when he was eager to run out of the city gates and into the arms of his beloved. But he now knew it was impossible. He had changed, and after this plague he had developed a habit of absent-mindedness, which, despite his desperate attempts to get rid of it, continued to haunt him like a hidden worry in his heart. In a way, he felt that the plague had ended too abruptly, and he was not mentally prepared. Happiness came so quickly, and the situation changed faster than people expected. Lambert knew that he would regain all that he had lost at once, and that joy would become a hot mouth, indiscerning taste.
In his novels, plays, essays, and treatises, Camus profoundly reveals the loneliness of man in a world of alienation, the growing alienation of the individual from himself, and the inevitability of sin and death, as the American scholar Robert Zerataski puts it: "Few writers are presented to us as much as he is as a man who writes for his own life and for ours." ”
Camus does not criticize the weakness of human nature, he gently understands the predicament of the individual, the compromise and weakness of each person. In his work, we can see the complexity of human nature in extreme circumstances. The vast majority of people are able to make simple judgments about good and evil, but only a few are willing to take actual actions based on their judgments. A smaller minority is willing to bear the price of choice.
In the face of the absurd real world, Camus's work is a unique spiritual food. Camus's works always start from the real predicament of human existence, revealing the absurdity of the world, but at the same time it is not hopeless and depressed, he advocates to resist in the absurd, and insist on truth and justice in despair.