Ep. 244: Camus on Strategies for Facing Plague (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 244 is something like, how shall we face adversity? And we read Albert Camus novel the plague from 1947. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, who might have been seen riding a glossy sorrel mare along the flower strewn avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

0:25 Seth: This is Seth Paskin learning nothing from history in Austin, Texas.

0:29 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey tending to my buboes and swollen ganglia in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:38 Mark: Hey, everybody, we're doing Camus again. We haven't done this in a long damn time. How do you all feel about that?

0:44 Seth: That was episode four. Something like that was the last time.

0:48 Mark: Number four. Had you guys read this book before?

0:51 Dylan: I never had.

0:52 Seth: No, me neither.

0:53 Mark: And the little bit I had seen of it made it look horrible. It made it look like it was just dwelling, just like describing flies buzzing around corpses. And it would just be hundreds of pages of that. But I really enjoyed this book. Like, he's such a good writer that just paragraph for paragraph, even though he's writing about horrible things, it was captivating

1:14 Wes: for people who haven't read it or haven't read it since high school. I heard it was selling out on Amazon or something. I'm not sure if that's true, but it's kind of fortuitous that the novel that best addresses our current predicament is actually really incredible. It's really one of the best. I now rank this among my favorites. As Mark said, he's a brilliant writer, and in my view, it's close to perfect as a novel. You know, strangely enough, I thought of him mainly as a philosopher, even though he thought of himself first and foremost as an essayist and novelist. And so I had no idea that it was such a great piece of work.

1:52 Seth: I had a certain amount of ambivalence in that. I agree. I mean, he's a gorgeous writer and the translation was very well done. It's beautiful. But at the same time, and I'm sure this is on purpose, I was just like, my headspace right now was like, I know I'm the one who suggested we do a topical episode on the pandemic, but I just had a really hard time slogging through, like, why are you guys talking about this? The characters having these seemingly either innocuous or Meaningless dialogue. While I was wanting the plot to further along, it was a hard read for me. It just. I enjoyed it, but I was also suffering at the same time, which I'm sure Camus would have appreciated.

2:37 Mark: Yeah, it's interesting that how this is on the one hand a chronicle and their whole, you know, a 10 page stretch where he'll just be talking in generalities about kind of how at that stage of the plague, people in general were reacting and the structure of the isolation camps and the technologies that were used, the bureaucracy involved. But then of course, we've got what, about five characters that are actually really well sketched out. So when you're saying, I want the plot to further, were you wanting to find out what was happening with those guys?

3:10 Seth: Like, no. No. There were many of those characters I just didn't want to know anything more about. After hearing the conversations. I get it, and this is part of the point, is the plague is ravaging the city and these guys are having pretty banal conversations in cafes, which is to the point, even though the narrator is involved in a lot of these conversations and he's certainly not disinterested in what's happening outside. But I just thought, why am I reading about this guy's novel when what's really important is who's gonna live and who's gonna die? And I'm sure that's Camus point, but I felt like he was kind of dragging me over glass shards at times.

3:48 Dylan: I actually think that's probably a pretty interesting question to think through about both what's motivating those characters for the different things that they're focused on and then why they're in the plague. Like, why is there this obsession by grand on, you know, the first line of this novel that he's trying to write and the language of that and why is that in Camus novel? I don't think that instances like that are put in there by Camus just to be, oh, let me throw in something that's banal just to make my point about the banality of suffering or something like that. I think he's put that in there for some specific reasons, I guess.

4:30 Mark: Yeah. I really think of this book as a grid that you've got the five books of very unequal lengths, sort of of the stages of the plague of realizing that it's coming on, it formally being declared, and people adjusting to that and gathering themselves to fight it. And then it's sort of getting as bad as it's going to get. Is that book three or. No, that's book four.

4:53 Wes: Book three describes the funerals and then gives an account of what it means to be separated from loved ones. And then book four, we get into the exhaustion of the main characters and Rambert deciding to abort his escape and stay with them. The illness of Othon's son, Paneloux's second sermon, and then the climactic balcony scene where it gets very philosophical being between Tarrou and Rieux. So I think, Mark, you're right. I think the actual description of suffering reaches its climax in this art part.

5:28 Mark: Well, book three is only 20 pages long. That's why I was forgetting what exactly was in it. Yeah. Book four is when it really kind of everybody's at their wit's end, ending with the second sermon and who dies at the end of. We're going to spoil this. I think that's fine. Tarrou doesn't die yet.

5:49 Wes: Tarrou dies in book five.

5:51 Dylan: Yep.

5:51 Wes: Othon's son and Paneloux die in book four.

5:54 Mark: And Grand is. They think he's gonna die, but he doesn't. So that's kind of the end of that. Oh, people are actually recovering. And so that's book five is the recovery. Those are the stages. And then these. I think it's five characters as the Y coordinate across these X coordinates. I don't know that I'd consider them like archetypes or something. I guess that's something to discuss. Like, did he describe these as. These are the strategies that one could take with regard to terrible things happening and with regard to life in general. Sort of. That's another theme to discuss. This is part of the subtext here, that we're all living in a state of plague all the time. We just don't realize it. We're all. All just like. We're all dying just slowly.

6:34 Wes: That's Taru's thesis. Right. In part four. One of the things about this novel is Camus doesn't leave you to sort out all the thematic stuff. He states it or he has a character stated. So for Rieux, what the plague represents, what being plague stricken represents is. I mean, I could read that right now if we want.

6:53 Mark: Sure. So this is the narrator. We don't find out. I don't know. I thought he was the narrator from the beginning. It wasn't a surprise to me when it was revealed at the end that he was the narrator. I guess I just assumed. Assumed it and thought maybe they'd even said it. But any case, he's the narrator. He's the doctor.

7:07 Wes: Well, I'm talking About Tarrou, not Rieux. Okay, well, there's a balcony scene between Rieux and. Are we gonna pronounce it Rieux?

7:16 Seth: Yeah.

7:16 Wes: There's a climactic balcony scene where Tarrou gives his for the first time, tells Rieux about his life and the fact that he had a father who was a prosecutor and he was disgusted. He had idealized his father up to the point where he went to court because his father was grooming him to go into law as well. And he went to court and saw him prosecuting a criminal who was going to be put to death, and then left and became a agitator of sorts, a revolutionary who was involved himself in some way or other with people getting killed and then had decided that the ways in which we harm each other describes are plague strickenness.

So the, you know, the plague is something that has been there before. And I think Rieux sees this in a slightly different way. And we get that in the way the novel starts out. But for Tarrou, this is about pacifism. To get rid of the plague is to come to the point where we minimize the harm that we do to each other. He's basically elaborating on the idea that nothing justifies putting anyone to death. And then he gets the point where this is in 211 in mind. I think if you add 20 pages to your. You guys, if you guys have bought the standard thing on Amazon, I think you probably have to add 20 pages.

8:36 Mark: But I use the archive.org one that has the page numbers written in just so it would be standard.

8:41 Wes: I see. Yeah. So I don't have the standards, so probably add about 20. But towards the end, I think of Tarrou's speech 211 in mine, he will say the microbe is what is natural. And then we must be careful not to infect others. The moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him, what's natural is the microbe. All the rest, health, integrity, purity, if you like, is the product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.

And it needs tremendous willpower, a never ending tension of the mind to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, It's a wearying business being plague stricken, but it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everybody in the world today looks so tired. Everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of Us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.

9:42 Mark: That sounds like original sin to me.

9:45 Wes: Well, let's parse that out. What is the sense in which we are all. Because, yeah, for him, it's global. You know, it's a glaring example as his father prosecuting someone and having them put to death. But in more subtle ways, the idea is that we are all imperiling each other and causing each other's death in some, you know, non literal sense. Doing this to each other, psychically infecting each other, sickening each other.

10:14 Dylan: And I wouldn't agree that it's original sin because I don't get the sense that it's a fallenness from Tarrou here. It's something that encompasses everyone. It's part of our entire existence. But it's not as if we were perfect and fell and our fallenness is that sin.

10:33 Wes: Well, Tarrou, remember, is interested in becoming a saint of sorts, right? That's what he talks about right after this passage. And then Rieux says, but you don't believe in God. And then Tarrou says something which is sort of a formulation of the absurdist or existentialist predicament. He says, the only problem is whether you can be a saint without a God in a godless world. How do we cash all this out? How do we cash out this obligation to help each other, as most of these characters have done during the plague? How do we cash out our ethical position in the world if there's no God?

If the role of essence is very strong, the role of determinism, if we're nothing but these material beings driven by circumstance, how do we pull something ethical out of that, you know, plague ultimately, right? It's thematically connected to the existentialist notion of necessity or essence. It's one side of ethical ambiguity. Part of what's absurd about the world is this confrontation between meaning making beings and a world that just doesn't give a shit about that and is trying to destroy you.

11:41 Mark: I was reading Walter Benjamin into it. So in the Benjamin that we read, you know, it's specifically when Tarrou, as a. As a youth sees an execution and understands sort of the foundation of society is based on murder. So I really take what he's saying very literally in that he's really trying to participate in social structures in. He still thinks you're going to be a murderer, but he tries to be an innocent murderer is the way he says it. So Kind of by participating in social relations at all. In that sense, maybe there is a fallenness to it, you know, if we didn't have this kind of social setup that was based on murder.

And I don't think Tarrou says, you know, it's certainly beyond his pay grade to like, is there a type of society that he wants to restructure things so that it's not this kind of situation anymore? You know, he's down in the thicket in, you know, working on a personal level with people. There is something about the recognition of absurdity that sounds like it works against political action. And this is how he's presented at the beginning is he's a guy, basically a voyeur. He loves to just watch people and take notes on them and take delight in weird things about human nature.

He takes notes about the guy who spits on cats. That doesn't seem to be that morally praiseworthy. And it's more as he's revealed through the story, you know, and as we get to this point that you can kind of see that in perspective. So he has this detached recognition of the absurd. But for him, that does as a very matter of course, you know, not as a matter of heroism. Go into, just like for Rieux, into working on behalf of the community.

13:16 Dylan: And Tarrou is a visitor to Oran, right? He's not a primary resident. He had just arrived there and yeah, he's a visitor.

13:25 Wes: He's been staying in a hotel, as Rieux, the narrator will put it. You know, he's. He's sort of a familiar face around town.

13:32 Mark: A mysterious visitor. Yes. Okay, so. But not like Rambert in terms of the there for the weekend kind of visitor.

13:39 Wes: That's right. The way he's described in the beginning. He's staying in a big hotel, center town, private means, goes to beaches every day, good humored, addict of all the normal pleasures without being their slave. And he hangs out with Spanish dancers and musicians. And then when the narrator begins to describe his notebooks, he talks about their understatement, the way they look at things through the wrong end of a telescope, or that you might get that impression because they're so attentive to trivial seeming details. And they show the satisfaction in finding a town that's so ugly to rue in the beginning, he just seems like a weird character who's going to be ethically inconsequential by the end of it. Right. There's something heroic about him. Even though Rieux is going to reject

14:26 Dylan: heroism, particularly his death, his death is rendered as like this giant fight that he has, and I don't know, to me, it was in the narrative is sort of the most impactful death, next to Othon's son.

14:42 Mark: I guess that's a question of. I mean, of course the whole thing is about how you face death, how you face the possibility of death. But I didn't really see necessarily. It's just a last bit of the tragedy. And yes, Tarrou talks about that he's fighting this thing, but he loses the fight. I guess I wasn't reading this as the pinnacle of his heroism, that it's just this is a terrible thing that's happening, like that's happened throughout everything. And if he had given up a day earlier and let himself, like, would that have destroyed the character in a way? I don't know.

15:12 Wes: There's talk of having to fight. So some people fight to stay alive. And I think what Dylan is noticing is that Tarrou engages in that fight. That's part of the whole death process for him. He tries hardest to stay alive. And that's important. The whole idea of trying to stay alive and trying to save others and not giving in to resignation, not saying. The narrator describes moralists in the town who's sort of given in to the idea that we just have to accept our fate, which kind of goes hand in hand with Peneloupe's first sermon, where the idea is that this is kind of a punishment for people's sins that they have to accept.

And the more existentialist type position here is that, no, we must fight. We must fight regardless of whether we think there's a God, and we must do it even if we know we're ultimately going to get defeated, because death is ultimately going to defeat us, as I forget which character points that out. And that's the feeling that Rieux has when Tarrou dies, right? So he says. This human form, his friends lacerated by the spear thrust of the plague, consumed by searing superhuman fires, buffeted by all the raging winds of heaven, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence.

And he could do nothing to avert the wreck. He could only stand unavailing on the shore, empty handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless yet again under the onset of calamity. And thus, when the end came, the tears that blinded Rieux's eyes were tears of impotence. And he did not see Tarrou roll over, face the wall, and die with a short, hollow groan. This is what we face in essence and necessity. It's not just a Happy story about our ethical comportment to the world conquering all. It's about acceptance without resignation, but acceptance of the fact that we're going to be overwhelmed by necessity, I guess, maybe

17:09 Mark: as a second character. So I was thinking of the main five. I wasn't including Paneloux, the priest, since he's, you know, really only pops up twice. Really.

17:17 Wes: He sort of becomes part of the gang, though, a little bit.

17:20 Mark: Yeah.

17:20 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

17:21 Mark: Actually, he does work by the time of the second sermon. So as you said. But this is Camus, if he's giving a judgment on religion, or maybe he's doing the thing that Dostoevsky does in Brothers Karamazov, famously, where he has one of the brothers Ivan sort of give this very famously quoted defense or expression of an atheist view. So I was interpreting his take on Paneloux as a not as charitable take on Christianity, certainly at the beginning. So he gives this as the plague is coming on this first sermon that he gives that everybody, like the whole town attends. Because at that point, they're all, you might as well try some religion. It couldn't hurt.

18:03 Seth: Yeah.

18:03 Wes: The church is overflowing. People are outside. It's this big dramatic scene.

18:08 Dylan: And they've just learned.

18:09 Unknown speaker: Right.

18:09 Dylan: You know, they've realized that all the scenes earlier on with all the rats coming out and falling over and dying in great mass was the preamble to the plague.

18:22 Mark: And even though he says, where's his first description of his renown in the area?

18:29 Wes: This is in part to. So the gates have already been shut, by the way, by the time this happens. And Rambert is already looking for help, leaving, getting out of there. So around 79 in my edition, maybe around 99 in yours. The narrator starts by noting he's a local celebrity, but it's not like people went to church all that much.

18:52 Mark: Here's the quote, though. He had shown himself a stalwart champion of Christian doctrine at its most precise and purest, equally remote from modern laxity and the obscurantism of the past. So he's not going to caricature this guy. He's not just going to be spouting mumbo jumbo. He's going to be giving what Camus thinks is like, what should Christianity say? And sure enough, he doesn't have a very positive view of Christianity. Camus does, I think, because this first one is, it's all your fault plagues come to punish us. God is not mocked. It's. You know, you might have occasionally gone to church, but these brief encounters could not Sate the fierce hunger of his love. So it's just entirely negative. And Rieux says, well, that he just feels that way because he's not actually witnessed that much real suffering. If he'd been like a country preacher and was. Anyway, that's where he starts.

19:43 Dylan: Well, he also uses it as a call back to the church. Not only is it that, you know, this is God punishing us for the fact that we haven't been good Christians, he's also using it to fan the flames of getting people in the pews, effectively. I shouldn't quite say it that way, because it's not like he's making a calculated business decision that he wants to get more people in the pews. What I mean is that he is characterizing it as, this is why you should believe. Because the only way you're going to get out of this is if you believe. When I was reading it, it felt like a twist on Pascal's Wager with the addition of, well, here's something really bad that's actually happening.

20:22 Wes: He does, though, Dylan, he does make it sound. He says, your brief encounters are not enough for the fierce hunger of God's love. Which is a weird way of thinking about it, making God so needy that he's pissed off that you haven't been showing up to church because God needs your. But as Mark put it, Ryu's claim to be objective and to try to be objective and fair, the narrative does come across that way. And then. And then, of course, we see a change in Paneloux. He gets closer, I think, to Rieux and the other characters. In a way. He accepts a certain dichotomy that they've put to him.

And then he just embraces the faith side, which means he has to leave everything to Providence. So that's why, you know, the whole point of the second sermon and what Paneloux is thinking through at that point is this idea that a priest shouldn't really call on a doctor, because at the point where you're trying to interfere with fate in a way, you've rejected Providence or something like that. I'm just thinking now about the evolution of Paneloux, which is also. It's not from fire and brimstone preacher to some sort of heroic position. It's more oblique, though.

21:33 Mark: He says, I accept everything I said before, but this is right after he just watched this child die. You know, sort of the most horrible part of the book. It's the son of the mayor, basically, the magistrate. Yes.

21:47 Wes: Othon.

21:48 Mark: Othon, who is a very minor. Yeah. And so he can't say. Rieux even says, like, you know, that child was innocent. Come on. I mean, that seems to be a reductio against what he said the first time. And he's like, well, in the second sermon, it's complicated. Some people are being punished after the death.

22:07 Wes: Rieux and Paneloux have a conversation. This is kind of reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. The idea is that there's nothing that can redeem the suffering of children. And Paneloux says, you know, it's revolting because it passes human understanding, but perhaps we should love what we can't understand. And Rieux will say he refuses to love a scheme of things in which children are tortured. And then they come to kind of a conclusion that, okay, they're united in working on this. But Paneloux thinks of this in terms of salvation, the salvation of the soul.

And Rieux says, I'm not working for salvation but for health. So, you know, health comes first. And what I hate is death and disease. So at another point, he says, I'm working against creation as I find it. So these are two different conceptions of the struggle. The first sermon kind of privileges the moral excellence of humanity and says, suffering is for the sake of that, or suffering is justified by that, by this quest for moral excellence. And that's the type of thing that Rieux rejects. And so then after that conversation, we get the evolution of peneloupe.

And I'll hand that off to you, Mark.

23:18 Mark: Sure. This is around page 200, 201. There is no doubt as to the existence of good and evil. And as a rule, it was easy to see the difference between them. The difficulty began when we looked into the nature of evil. And among things, evil included human suffering. Thus, we had apparently needful pain and apparently needless pain. We had don Juan cast into hell and a child's death. For while it is right that a libertine should be struck down, we see no reason for a child's suffering. And truth to tell, nothing was more important on earth than a child's suffering, the horror it inspires in us, and the reasons we must find to account for it in other manifestations of life.

God made things easy for us, and thus far, our religion had no merit. But in this respect, he put us, so to speak, with our backs to the wall. Indeed, we are up against the wall that plague had built around us in its lethal shadow. We must work out our salvation. I, like, at least acknowledge it's not just, oh, you're being punished because you're all sinners. Obviously, some of you are not sinners. But he has to buy into that. I want to say Leibnizian, you know, we cannot possibly understand, you know, I can't know. He says he can't know that a child's sufferings will be compensated by an eternity of bliss awaiting that child.

You know, we kind of just have to use faith and accept that this is, in fact, the best possible world, and we're being challenged. So in a certain way, I think he's sticking to his guns, but with a deepened understanding and compassion.

24:36 Dylan: This is where, I mean, Rieux doesn't have anything, anything of it, right. Because Paneloux puts it in the form of maybe it's a version of the best of all possible worlds thing, but he formulates it in terms of love, that even this child's death is a version of God's love. And he says, but perhaps we should love what we cannot understand. And Rieux shakes his head and he says, no, Father, I have a very different idea of love. And until my dying day, I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

25:08 Wes: Yeah, so that's the conversation before the sermon. And then the way that sermon ends is he calls for total acceptance, not resignation. So he's not. And I think that's one of the modifications of the earlier position, which does sound sort of like a resignation to punishment. Ryu's rejection of resignation as sort of, that's one of the things that's affected him. But he calls for what he calls active fatalism or humility, humiliation. And the thing that seems to justify the suffering of children is that we would die of spiritual hunger without it.

And then later on, only total self surrender can justify the suffering of children. I think it's a variation on the idea that the whole concept of free will, or the ethical requires the possibility of, you know, it's the whole theodicy or rationalization of the existence of the evil, evil in the world by claiming that to be spiritual beings, to be capable of free will, this sort of suffering is actually necessary. And this, I think, is something both Rieux and Tarrou reject. So one of the things Tarrou rejects, right? Tarrou is very suspicious of any kind of moralism because he thinks it's just used to justify murder ultimately.

And you get a kind of hint of that here, right? It's this idea that the existence of suffering is necessary for the existence of an ethical order. And so that's how we justify it. And I think, you know, in Tarrou and Rieux, we see a rejection of that that idea.

26:49 Mark: There's this one part in the middle of the sermon where Paneloux says we must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything?

26:57 Wes: Yeah, that's the other weird aspect of this.

26:59 Mark: Well, it sounds like existentialist Christianity to me. I don't know if he read Kierkegaard or how close this is to something Kierkegaard actually said, but it's what I associate with that that we have to stick to this theodicy. But unlike Leibniz, who kind of thinks he can demonstrate the theodicy, demonstrate that even the worst child suffering is in fact part of the best possible world, a more mature Christianity, hundreds of years later is going to say, come on, you can't actually live through suffering and believe that. It's going to buy Voltaire's critique by saying you cannot rationally believe that the suffering is justified. But can you irrationally believe that? Can you just make the leap of faith and we are forced to this Christian view that we either believe everything or we just are nihilists.

27:43 Wes: Well, what does it mean to believe everything?

27:45 Dylan: Doesn't it hinge on believing in the goodness of God?

27:49 Mark: Yes, that's what the everything involved. Everything Christianity has taught you. I think that's a shorthand for Christians. I mean, someone come up to you on the street and just ask you, do you believe? Like, of course, what they mean is the edifice of Christianity, at least in its broad strokes. Like that's just a situational background assumption. In a non pluralistic society, the believe

28:11 Wes: everything or deny everything. I'm not sure it's the believe everything just applies to Christian doctrine. There's a discussion by other priests of the potential heresy that's involved in this way of thinking. I don't think it's very orthodox.

28:25 Mark: Well, are they referring to this part because he brings it up himself that maybe this is heretical, but there have been periods in history where purgatory could not be hoped for. Periods when it was possible to speak of venial sin. Every sin was deadly and any indifference criminal. It was all or it was nothing. So that seems to be in ordinary, comfortable times we can worry about like, oh, well, that was a little bad and say a few Hail Marys. But when we're really being tested, either you're on God's side or you're not.

28:54 Wes: Yeah.

28:55 Dylan: In the next paragraph, he says the he here is Father Paneloux. He was saying that the total acceptance of which he had been speaking was not to be taken in the limited sense usually given to the words. He was not thinking of mere resignation or even the harder virtue, humility. It involved humiliation, but humiliation to which the person humiliated gave full assent. True, the agony of a child was humiliating to the heart and to the mind. But that was why he had come to terms with it. And that too was why. And here Paneloux assured those present that it was not easy to say what he was about to say. Since it was God's will, we too should will it. And thus only the Christian could face the problem squarely. And scorning subterfuge pierced to the heart of the supreme issue, the essential choice. And his choice was to believe everything so as not to be forced into denying everything.

29:44 Wes: Yeah, so I think the believe everything has something to do with embracing the suffering, right?

29:49 Dylan: Well, it's embracing the suffering, but under the terms that. That suffering is God's will.

29:53 Wes: Right.

29:53 Dylan: And in that way it links back to the first sermon. Right, the first sermon. The plague is God's will, except it's formulated in terms of our punishment. And therefore we've done something wrong. And here we no longer. It's not understood as a punishment for which we must at, but it is a suffering that was still willed by God, and therefore we should will it ourselves. And it's under those terms, based upon the stakes are either accepting God or denying God.

30:25 Wes: Yeah, and the way this bit ends is with something I alluded to, which is that he says it is wrong to say this. I understand, but that I cannot accept. We must go straight to the heart of that which is unacceptable, precisely because it is thus that we are constrained to make our choice. The sufferings of children were our bread of affliction, but without this bread, our souls would die of spiritual hunger. Yeah, I think Mark is right. This does sound like an existentialist Christian leap of faith territory. Accepting the absurdity of this and not engaging in rationalizations like this is about punishment.

31:02 Dylan: For instance, the dying of spiritual hunger is basically the lack of nourishment from falling into an abyss of nihilism. That's the idea of.

31:11 Wes: So he's referring back to a previous part.

31:14 Dylan: I'm just wanting to make sure I understand what the food for our souls are that we would be depriving in this case. I mean, it's related to why we must believe in God. Our souls will shrivel and die. We will suffer from spiritual hunger without willing the suffering of children.

31:35 Wes: I think it has something to do, right, with embracing something absurd. There is no spirituality without that it's

31:42 Dylan: the reason why someone like Kierkegaard is going to be so fascinated with the story of Isaac.

31:47 Wes: Right.

31:48 Seth: I find it interesting that we spent like you guys have spent the last, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes on panelou when he's one of several characters and certainly not even the most significant.

32:01 Wes: What we're spending time on is trying to interpret what all of this means. And so each of these, you know, these are major parts that give us different interpretations.

32:10 Mark: So my interpretation is that Camus pretty roundly rejecting Christianity, that he's. He's saying there's. So Taru's way of putting. Panelou's second sermon is. Paneloux is right. When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose his faith. So he'll go through with it to the end. That's what he meant to say. And that's pretty much what happens to Paneloux, you know, that he dies of the plague. He says no to getting a doctor. That, you know, this kind of comes up a couple times that a doctor's visit.

For a real Christian, you should be a Christian scientist. You know, the doctor's visit is against his principles. And I just saw this as, according to Camus, a reductio against Christianity. Not that this character is without merit. There is definitely something noble about him and his growth throughout there. But that this is ultimately certainly not going to be Camus position.

33:00 Wes: He represents one horn of a dilemma, and it's because he sticks to his principles that he can represent that horn. Right. Most people waver in between. They just. The existentialist of Ryu's sort goes one direction and Paneloux goes another. You either reject providence or you embrace it. Embrace your fate or you fight against it. The existentialist fights. Seth, what part did you want to talk about?

33:25 Seth: I was merely remarking that it struck me as interesting that sort of gravitated to that figure. And when you mentioned at the beginning, Wes, that you think it's, you know, almost a perfect novel, I was thinking structurally, maybe, yes. But the characters. There's a reading of this where all the characters represent archetypes or at least paradigms of some sort of a specific kind of response to the plague, which is to say, a specific kind of response to the imminence of death, which is what Camus seems to be, or I took Camus to be particularly interested in.

Right. The plague and war are simply mechanisms that destroy our ability to project into the future, make us forget the past and do two things. Bring us to the immediate present and bring us to the realization of the very possibility of our own death. And so maybe it's just a cliche reading, but each one of the characters, you know, is taking a particular. They evolve, of course, which is why the novels. This isn't like Ayn Rand, you know, where they're just mouthpieces, but each one of them represents a kind of a different way of responding to or dealing with.

And I found, you know, Panelou's response is a little cliched, at least in its initial invocation. And the lesson I got, I wasn't interested so much in how he changes his perspective in the second half, but more about the fact that Rieux says that he can say that what he says initially because he hasn't really experienced human suffering, and that it's the visceral, immediate experience of death and seeing suffering. Yes, it's a child, but just that experience that then he's not going to suddenly switch over to become an existentialist in the way that a paradigmatic existentialist.

He has to now struggle with the realization that suffering is real and tangible and concrete. And he's got to now reconcile that with his fate, which is what you guys were working out. I just thought it was interesting that he was getting so much airtime.

35:31 Mark: I think the simplest one that we could probably still finish in the first half here is Rambert, who is also not one of the major three or four characters, I think, but pretty close. He's a journalist. He's the guy who really is just in, you know, for the weekend or whatever.

35:44 Seth: He's.

35:44 Mark: He's trying to write a story, apparently, on the living conditions of the Arab population in this North African city. But he gets stuck there, and his wife is out, and he's the romantic, so that if we. If he's going to be an archetype. Camus spends a lot of time sort of talking about the general type of person as well as Rambert's specific situation, you know, because they're so concerned with their being parted from their loved one. Even though it seems like it's miserable, it's actually kind of good. It distracts them from just how awful and drab it is.

And if they are killed by the plague, they probably didn't even see it coming, you know, so having a goal in this situation seems like a good thing. And his progression through this is. I've actually found the most boring parts of this book were his repeated attempts to get out of the city. And he meets up with these people who hook him up with somebody else, and they eat at a cafe. And then. And he kind of says goodbye three or four times. And finally, when it seems like he's finally going to be able to get away, he says he's already been working sort of on an interim basis with the sanitary squads that Tarrou actually set up under Ryu's guidance.

And he says, I'm gonna stick with it. I think there's more value in me being here.

36:50 Wes: Well, importantly, ashamed in front of the woman he loves. He's been privileging love and the happiness of love over all the rest of it. And that's the conflict that gets teased out here in the end. 174 is where he talks about the shame of leaving. So if he went away, he would feel ashamed of himself, and that would embarrass his relations with the woman he loved. Showing more animation. Rieux told him that was sheer nonsense. There was nothing shameful in preferring happiness. I know that I belong here whether I want it or not.

37:21 Mark: So that's that next line that I was looking for. He says, certainly, Rambe replied, but it may be shameful to be happy by oneself.

37:28 Wes: So then, well, I guess. Tarrou remarks that if you take a share in other people's unhappiness, you have no time left for happiness. So you have to make a choice. So there's this kind of choice between running away and being happy with the one you love, or staying here and helping out. And then he, you know, what Rambert says is, you know, it's not that I want to be here, but this business is everybody's business. And that's a recurring idea throughout the novel. It's a way of expressing the idea that it's simply an obligation that is beyond all of the other considerations to fight against the plague and to help others.

38:01 Mark: I wasn't expecting solidarity from this existentialist text. Like, there are definitely parts in here that exclaim about how, you know, people try to complain to each other and they realize, like, that they're not actually talking about the same thing. He has lots of passages about the inadequacy of language to really convey things that Tarrou and Ryu's friendship could never really be conveyed. The love between Rieux and his mother could. Yeah, so there's all these sort of existentialist isolation things, but we're together in our isolation. That's the kind of key, is to recognize the common human condition and work for the Good of the group.

38:35 Dylan: I just was gonna echo the theme of solidarity in the novel, going hand in hand with the existential. But we're suffering in it together. And that's part of the way in which we fight back is in a kind of coordinated way, whether it be sort of implicitly in the novel, where there's the mechanisms in which people are relieving other people's suffering by trying to treat and take care of the ill. Rieux being the doctor, but also the other main characters are involved in that activity. And Tarrou, interestingly, as was pointed out, starts out being this man of unknown means who's just kind of hanging out, but ends up being sort of fundamental to the implementation of taking care of people and running the sanitation squads and participating in them and stuff like that. I just was echoing that note of solidarity that runs through the book.

39:29 Wes: I mean, I don't know how all of this relates to love exactly, because that's one of the things that we get very early on in the novel is this idea that the death, the fact that people are dying isn't exactly the worst thing. It's this feeling of exile, especially for people who have loved ones who are kind of stuck out of town and can't return while the town's under lockdown. It's this feeling of missing people, the horrible longing for your loved ones that you can't see and, in fact, can't do anything but telegram, it turns out, or write letters to you.

Can't, it turns out. Calls are prohibited. And so Rambert, in a way, is representative of that. He's representative of the person who is suffering because they have a loved one that they want to be with. And, you know, he's privileging love above all else. Whereas Rieux, you know, Rieux also has a wife who's stuck out of town and she's herself dying of some other disease. But by contrast, his focus is simply on helping fellow human beings who are dying. So that's the conflict. And I don't know how you work that out exactly whether the novel has worked that out.

It sounds like a conflict between obligation and personal happiness.

40:37 Mark: I just think Camus has a very ambivalent take on love throughout here. Kind of like. And maybe this is. We'll save this for when we talk about grand.

40:45 Seth: Just.

40:46 Mark: There are things we do in this meaningless world to occupy ourselves, and love is one of them. And so, on the one hand, it is ennobling, and it is a thing that you can feel truly alive about. But on the other hand, come on don't get overly melodramatic. It doesn't go as deeply into the other person as you think. It is more a way of sort of tricking yourself, amusing yourself. That's at least, I think, his take on romantic love.

41:13 Wes: I didn't see that. I take him as being quite pro love and romantic himself. Where do you get the sort of cynicism part.

41:22 Mark: It's part and parcel of the kind of his whole even setup of the town itself before the plague attacks, which is something we can start to talk about here. I guess people keep themselves busy. The town itself is kind of a shallow place. It's very focused on business. And he says when people love in that situation, they either love really intently for a little bit. This is page three. Men and women consume each other one another rapidly in what is called the act of love, or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality.

41:55 Wes: This actually, for me was something I couldn't. I didn't fully understand about the novel because, you know, he starts out that way. And actually, I think that is thematically important. This idea of plague already being part of life, in a sense. And it's one of the things that makes people oblivious and in denial and not ready to see the real danger when it's coming. People are sort of half living. It speaks to Tarou's idea. You know, for Tarrou, the idea is that there's so much violence in the world. But I think we can also read the beginning of the novel is the idea that death has already entered into things in the sense that people are engaged in this repetitive kind of automatic, soulless living.

Right. But that's not really the way he talks about it through most of the rest of the novel. He describes these scenes of people feeling terrible longing for loved ones and being so happy when they're reunited with them. That is something just to me, he doesn't fully round that out. And I don't know if it's meant to be a tension in Ryu's character where he starts out seeing the town that way, or if it's just a fault of the novel, but to me it's inconsistent.

43:01 Mark: I just felt like he was giving very, very accurate, detailed psychological observations. Another quote about people being distracted by love first so that they didn't worry about the plague. Eventually they had lost love's egoism and the benefit they derived from that. I see another quote here. Since love asks something of the future and nothing was left us but a series of present moments. Maybe the reason we're not getting a clear pro or con is because he's kind of being value neutral about it. He's just saying things about, you know, how it works in people's heads.

43:31 Dylan: I took this attitude, this particular attitude of love to be Ryu's. I think that there are several different attitudes about love. And I don't know, maybe you want to just put whatever Camus thinks into Ryu's mouth. Rieux, I think, demonstrates a kind of. He seems to love his wife, but his attitude about her leaving seems to be one of significant relief. Not just because she's going to go to a place, to a hospital, away to get healthy, but also that she's out of his way.

44:04 Seth: He doesn't have to worry about her. In the same way, sending her to a sanitarium for treatment is one thing. If she's there, he's treating patients for 14 hours a day and then comes home and has to treat his wife, both as his spouse and as a patient. It would introduce another level of stress.

44:21 Dylan: But that process of her going to the sanitarium and in fact takes place before the plague sets in, it's not even as if she leaves. And his attitude towards. He has a kind of resignation about love, which I think is true all the way to the end, even when he finds out that his wife has died at the very end. Whereas, you know, Rambert's attitude towards love and his lover, you know, changes along the way, as we've mentioned a bit before, but I think is an indifferent engagement with love.

44:52 Wes: Rambert is actually, to me, he's representative of a wide to a large part of the population. In the beginning of the novel, we get the narrator's depiction of the town as being kind of shallow and love relations being kind of shallow. And then some of the parts that Mark has read, we get a depiction of the way plague has affected people's capacity to love and the way in which loving takes place, including something that's very distressing, which is their inability to remember people. That becomes a big problem, and they remember and wishing they had paid more attention, wishing they had been actually less shallow.

So maybe I'm going to end up resolving this here. In part three, there's a whole section on people being separated from their loved ones. And so I'll just read a little bit of it to give you the flavor. The chief source of distress, the deepest as well as the most widespread, was separation. And it is his duty to say more about it as it existed in the later stages of the plague. It cannot be denied that Even this distress was coming to lose something of its poignancy. Was it that our fellow citizens, even those who had felt that departing from their loved ones most keenly, were getting used to doing without them?

So this is where he's actually giving us some of the distress over forgetting people. Their imagination fails them. They, you know, have trouble recalling someone's face, lost the power of imagining the intimacy that was once theirs. And then the way it's all capped off in the end is this. Scenes of huge anticipation to reunite with people and celebration. And there's no element of cynicism in that. So I think what I'm trying to say is even though he describes the effect of shallow daily living on love and the plague on love, I don't see him as ultimately pessimistic about love.

And he seems actually quite optimistic about the goodness of people and their capacity for love.