Camus on Quarantine

I've known about Albert Camus for the longest time, but hadn't read much by him aside from a few short essays in Summer in Algiers (a Penguin pocket book I picked up in Cambridge) and The Myth of Sisyphus, though I don't remember much about that one.  I did read The Stranger a couple of years ago, and naturally I decided I needed to rectify this gap by reading The Plague in the midst of this pandemic.  (I'm in basically the same boat regarding Celine, an even darker writer, and I'll probably get around to one or two of his novels by the late summer/early fall.)

I personally can't vouch for the quality of the translation, but several reviewers felt that the recent (2001) translation by Robin Buss was better than the more widely-known one by Stuart Gilbert.  I was fortunate (and a bit foresighted) in picking up a copy of Buss's translation from the Trinity Library (a day or two after the Toronto Public Libraries had completely shuttered).

The first part certainly rings true with the authorities dithering (and generally waiting for word from even higher up the chain) with at least some people wanting to downplay the dangers to avoid upsetting people and being "bad for business," more or less.  Some things never change.

Then part one ends with Oran being quarantined and completely closed off from the rest of the world.  The next section opens with people coming to grips with their new reality.  "In the first hours of the day when the decree took effect, the Prefecture was besieged by a crowd of applicants who, on the phone or face-to-face with the town officials, were explaining situations that were all equally interesting and at the same time equally impossible to consider.  In truth, it was several days before we realized that we were in an extreme situation and that the words 'compromise', 'favour' and 'exception' no longer had any meaning."

Just a bit after that, Camus notes that some people were able to pass messages through the guards at first.  "This was in the early days of the epidemic, at a time when the guards found it normal to give in to compassionate impulses.  But after a short while, when these same guards had become fully persuaded of the gravity of the situation, they refused to take responsibility for anything when they did not know where it might lead."

This ultimately leads to strict rationing of telephone calls, from a relatively small number of public phone booths, and to the widespread use of telegrams!

So in one sense, we are in a very different situation, as most of the world is now on lock down, and there aren't really any safe places (not that this hasn't stopped some people from trying to flee to rural, remote areas).  On the other hand, we are more connected than ever electronically, and staying in touch (remotely) is probably the least of our worries.

Nonetheless, I was struck by a few news reports about Canadians stuck outside of Canada with few options to return.  Or in particular one family trying to have an "exception" made for their Peruvian nanny, who was not allowed to come back with them.  It's likely that even now there are (too) many compassionate exceptions being made, but people will soon start understanding that the authorities are serious and that the rules apply to them as well.

I haven't seen too many people crowding together, with the possible exception of people too close together at the grocery store (currently exempted as an essential need that people are allowed to travel to undertake), but the stories out of the UK, Ireland, Australia and even France are pretty dispiriting.  What's even more dispiriting is that if we had the ability to do truly widespread testing (and had taken this seriously as people returned from foreign vacations!), we could probably wrestle this pandemic under control in a month or two, but we don't, so we'll try this much more inefficient approach of breaking transmission through "social distancing."

I'll probably just push through the rest of The Plague over the next couple of days, as I don't expect to be going anywhere for quite some time...