Mass hysteria breaks out in a "treeless, glamour-less, and soulless" city when thousands of rats stream in bearing a plague. At first, the citizens who "work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich" treat this pestilence as "a bad dream that will pass away." When this doesn't happen, people desperately call for the government to act, which the government is slow to do. Given the state of the world these days, and especially the situation in West Africa, I reread The Plague by Albert Camus. Like Shakespeare's King Lear, it's something we read in high school so that later in life, when we've learned enough to understand what it's about, we look to its lessons. The 1947 novel is set in...
↧
