Camus wrote the book on plague. He gave artistic life to that threat of death and just how it animates the powerful and the weak.
From his Left Bank apartment in the 1940s near the Abwehr’s headquarters at the Lutetia hotel, in front of which the AR has shuddered in safer times, Camus earned money as a proofreader for a publishing house and courageously edited and wrote for the underground paper Combat.
Steve Coll in The New Yorker: “In addition to his day job, Camus struggled to write what would become The Plague, a novel, published in 1947, that has enjoyed a deserved revival in this time of the coronavirus, with writers reflecting on it as an allegory about the virus of fascism.”
How to live in plague time? How to live? The AR can hear Titmarsh’s plaintive cry. And the quiet cry of Johannes de Silentio and so many more at home or having to go to dangerous workplaces or suffering loss of loved ones.
Coll quotes Camus biographer Robert Zaresky that “there is nothing ordinary about humanity and good sense.”
The fascism virus, like the corona, is no respecter of a country’s previous achievements or its self-identity. When it comes upon its host it thrives indifferently and looks to feed on others. Only honesty and good sense, decency, matter in the face of such an enemy.
Honesty with oneself to begin with. The AR and Dee have been running a home-viewing marathon of Akira Kurosawa’s films. Among the many tremendous films, not just the Seven Samurai but also Ikiru and the astonishingly influential Rashomon that won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and launched Kurosawa’s career as a major international auteur. A central message in Ikiru and Rashomon is our capacity for self-deception, how creative and lasting and damaging it is.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen expresses well a lesson we can learn from Germany about confronting our self-deception. “This month, on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, said: ‘Germany’s past is a fractured past — with responsibility for the murdering of millions and the suffering of millions. That breaks our hearts to this day. And that is why I say that this country can only be loved with a broken heart.'”
Harriet Sherwood in the Guardian reminds us no country is free of self-deception as she describes the 43 Group, Jews in England after WWII, including Vidal Sassoon, who took to the streets to fight home-grown fascists, Nazi sympathizers, led by Oswald Mosley, and tolerated by the police. Anti-semitic riots took place in various English cities after the war. And the AR remembers the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939.
When one tries to love one’s neighbour as thyself, it will be the more achievable — and all the stronger and more durable — coming from awareness of the broken heart.
J. B. Thompson 