Another, a traveling salesman, tries to commit suicide. One character, a journalist who was on assignment and finds himself trapped, is only concerned with escaping Oran to get back to his girlfriend. These actions include quarantining the entire population within the city walls. “The Plague” follows a group of characters who at first have different reactions to both the plague and the actions taken by the town to try to limit its spread. This acutely prophetic opening to the novel is just the prodigious beginning of a treatise on how pandemics and human nature are inextricably intertwined. The only “real cure” for Covid, as a recent article in the Globe and Mail co-written by both an emergency room physician and an indigenous leader points out, is reversing our disharmonious relationship with nature and ourselves.
And what drives this destruction? Well, good old-fashioned capitalistic greed of course.Ĭamus nailed it right on the first page, an impressive feat for someone that did not have modern scientific studies to back him up. These are the pre-existing conditions to the onset of the plague in the novel, and if we really think about it, they are also pretty accurate in our own time as well.Įxperts from the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) do believe that it is the destruction of nature that is the underlying cause of the emergence of pandemics like Covid-19, and more to come if we don’t stop.
In other words, Camus begins his work with a harsh critique of modern human society: its disconnection with nature and self-absorbed materialism. It is a city where “you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves.” The inhabitants are equally “boring” to Camus, as they are primarily concerned with “doing business” and devote most of their time to “making money, as much as possible.” On the very first page of “The Plague” Camus describes the seaside town of Oran before the plague hits as being “ugly” and without “trees or gardens”. Disconnection: The Root Cause of Pandemics
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