I started reading Camus at the opening of the plague. It was a book a lost friend recommended to me years ago, before anyone was thinking about pandemics. Eventually we realized no one had been thinking about her either. So it goes.

Albert outlined the beginning of the pandemic quite accurately. For many weeks people denied the possibility. Nobody wanted to believe it was happening again, not in their town, not to their neighbors and friends. But the bodies started building up: fresh flesh-rot wafted in from the apartment across the alley to repudiate unbelieving nostrils with the certainty of mortality. As public officials started to take action, the markets quivered and swayed, supply lines stressed by demand and diminishing supply left store shelves depleted one week and encumbered the next. Like snakes in the grass, merchants peddled their impotent oils, capitalizing on fears, like most successful businessmen do.

The similarities end very abruptly here, however, particularly with Camus’ focus on the heroes of any outbreak story: the medical professionals who face death day in and day out, desperately cloning to their sense that human life, among all that death, still has meaning. In our reality, we never saw the medical professionals, never even saw the bodies. Both were confined to the privacy-compliant institutions of hospitals, obscuring the true toll of the virus. And so the fictions took hold.

Perhaps another striking difference is the lack of politics in Camus’ rendition of events. It could be a stroke of luck in a sense to suffer a public health emergency under a colonial government. The politics of the citizenry - the colonized - are unimportant. The government will as it desires, rather than in response to the in-this-case-non-voting public pressuring and pillorying. So in his version, the provincial officials closed down the city, set up camps for tending to the sick, near all of whom died, and generally worked to curb and mitigate the disaster. After all, their success was measured by their outcomes, not their campaign rallies.

It didn’t help that in our story the people in power were least impacted by the pestilence. Camus’ contaminant struck rich and poor, weak and strong, young and old alike without prejudice, without mercy. It engaged in a wanton devastation, not a reinforcement of classical social battle lines.

Most disappointing of all was the pied-noir’s naïveté, or rather my own, that maybe we could manifest the sense of honor and duty towards our community, society, and species that so many fictional characters did. The novel was not saccharinely optimistic: one otherwise amiable chap concluded his arc in a firefight with the police, but his was a minority sentiment. The quarantine promised him more than normalcy could. For us, using the word normalcy is a virtue signal about whether we think our honor is to the prevention of illness or to the prevention of tyranny.

What a civilization depends on is the continuous effort to balance public good and private freedom. Perhaps after two generations of fat peace, we have forgotten how to orient ourselves to the line, or even why we wanted to in the first place. One might have hoped for this to be what reunited us, but our experiment over the past few years with self-inflicted social distancing via social media ought to have disavowed us of that delusion right away. We stopped caring about the public good long ago.

The days are getting colder, but our tempers are not, and the sickness rages on.

Four horsemen drove pale upon our anxious town
Three citizens claimed them political fabrications
Two more blamed the former for their hanging ‘round
One pure soul suggested abnegation
Zero heeded his warning’s sound