The Plague
Albert Camus wrote The Plague,
a novel in which the bubonic plague
has broken out in Algeria,
in the coastal town of Oran,
in the 1940s. The plague is
the Black Death of the fourteenth century,
which killed a third of Europe.
In The Plague the bureaucrats muddy things.
It’s a false alarm, says one, and let’s not call it
a plague but an unusual type of fever.
Lots of plagues in history, yet each comes as a surprise.
The will—the competitive desire to live
while others are dying—is most intense in a calamity.
Nine months from now more babies will be born.
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