Brain Food #425
The Plague
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
One of the great things about fiction is that it can offer us the comfort of manifesting some of the horrors we are too afraid to admit, and by doing so it provides us with solace, either because it is usually much more horrific than real life, or because somehow there is always the prospect of survival at the end.
Albert Camus wrote The Plague, a fictional account of a bubonic plague outbreak in the French Algerian city of Oran, in 1947.
What the world is going through today has happened, in some way, before, and has been imagined and thought about before.
The start of the outbreak takes a long time to accept, the spread carries on, regardless of its acknowledgment.
On the dangers of ignorance:
“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”
On our tragic selfishness:
“In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.”