Aloha’s Reviews > The Plague > Status Update

This book could apply to the COVID epidemic. People’s reactions, lack of resources, equipment, medical help, general fatigue. Mark of great literature is that it’s bitingly truthful and timeless.

“…a new phase of the epidemic was ushered in when the radio announced no longer weekly totals, but ninety-two, a hundred and seven, and a hundred and thirty deaths in a day. “The newspapers and the authorities are playing ball with the plague. They fancy they’re scoring off it because a hundred and thirty is a smaller figure than nine hundred and ten.””

“That incessant sunlight and those bright hours associated with siesta or with holidays no longer invited, as in the past, to frolics and flirtation on the beaches. Now they rang hollow in the silence of the closed town, they had lost the golden spell of happier summers. Plague had killed all colors, vetoed pleasure.”

“Still, if it was an exile, it was, for most of us, exile in one’s own home.”

“Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.”

Some things never change. Reading this post COVID. “It comes to this. We are to take the responsibility of acting as though the epidemic were plague.” This way of putting it met with general approval. “It doesn’t matter to me,” Rieux said, “how you phrase it. My point is that we should not act as if there were no likelihood that half the population would be wiped out; for then it would be.”