by Albert Camus (1913-1960)
translation into English (1948) of La Peste by Stuart Gilbert (1883-1969).

Next roll: 1304. That’s The Plague by Camus. The first listed work by Camus, at position 1303, to which I would normally fall back, is The Stranger, but ha HA! I’ve actually already read The Stranger! Even by my most self-critical standard, I’ve read The Stranger – I read it only last year (since this site started!) and remember it well. In general, anything I read prior to graduating from college is going to be considered suspect, which means there are only a very few great books I’ll be able to check off this list. But this is one of them, and I got to it on only the 7th try.

Furthermore, a copy of The Plague, seen above, had already been sitting on my bookshelf, having been given to me for my birthday last year by my grandmother, after hearing that I had read and enjoyed The Stranger, which she had given me previously. And my roommate, helping himself to my books, had very recently read my copy of The Plague and strongly recommended it to me. And then the magic-number machine spat it out for me. Think of that. Which is lucky, since apparently I’m more likely to listen to random.org than to my grandmother or my roommate.

The Plague was excellent, a masterpiece. Very powerful.

This sincere praise is pretty bland compared to my elaborate whining about books I liked less, but that’s the way it goes.

The Stranger impressed me as an intelligent, memorable, well-conceived, well-controlled piece of work. But this was monumental in a way that the earlier work wasn’t – it felt important, which is a word I generally don’t feel comfortable applying to a piece of art. In this case I feel comfortable. The sense of moral purpose behind this work was intense, and the depth of thought justified that intensity.

It’s a commonplace to say that the function of art is to show us things about life, about the real world, but often this seems to be a bland justification after-the-fact for art that, in practice, feels like it has some other kind of aspirations. This was art that felt like it wanted to show me something about the real world, like the author was aware of the full scope of what he as a writer might try to accomplish morally – and was attempting it. I felt, in reading it, that the book wanted to convey a moral content more than it wanted to be, say, “intelligent” or “fine,” and that it only was those things – which it very much was – because they contribute to the power of the work as a whole. The ultimate purpose of which is moral.

It’s been hard for me to write anything here about the book in part because I felt obliged to summarize that moral content, and found that I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate what had nonetheless struck me as vital and coherent in the reading. But – it is also a commonplace (common, anyway) to say that one writes a poem rather than prose because the specific intended “meaning” can only be expressed as a poem. And I think the same could apply here. The philosophical content of this book has been expressed as a novel because the novel conveys a whole that would have to be fractured to be expressed more prosaically. Inherently philosophical though that whole may be. The book is a vision rather than a message.

That said, there is at least one facet of the moral content that I can articulate (and I see that it again relates to the general philosophical line I’ve found myself on recently). That being: Life is meaningless and all our values, emotions, institutions, customs, etc. are illusions, flimsy constructions. And the clarity of this knowledge is of course a kind of horrible, inescapable, deadening sobriety for those who attain it. But, NONETHELESS, despite life’s being meaningless, we must continue to do good for one another. That it is possible to know that only we ourselves imbue all things with meaning, and still, in all clarity, believe that these meanings deserve to be honored.

I think this is about as vital a philosophical message as could be conveyed to modern times. The elephant in the room of our contemporary culture is that everybody already knows that ultimately everything is meaningless. Camus describes a society that resists and resists this knowledge as it is gradually worn down by indifferent nature (only his most intellectually inclined protagonists already know it). The society I live in, far safer and more affluent, nonetheless is much closer to the philosophical precipice at all times. It’s just sort of in the air, and we’re all pretty much braced to wince at – or shrug at – or in some cases, try to drown out by protesting – the sad but unsurprising news that we’re evolutionarily programmed to believe everything that we believe and feel everything that we feel, and that the indifferent universe discovered by science is the real bottom line. We would love to turn back from this knowledge to a time of real beliefs, but we can’t in good faith, because the arguments that got us here can never be erased and will always be rational. So we’re stuck here, and I think this new philosophical reality is, at some level, responsible for most of what ails the world today – because nobody can quite figure out what we’re supposed to do when we know that nothing is important important, “in the scheme of things.” But Camus, 60 years ago, was already showing us characters who are at that precipice, or over it, and who are driven to do good anyway. They believe that the meanings that we share, even though we invent them and know that we do, can still be worthy. This is a next step for all of us, a step that the human race as a whole must gradually take. It’s something that we can all nod at, but to feel it in the gut of the culture will take a long time.

I assume this is what is meant by the quote on the back cover, from the New York Times: “Of such importance to our time that to dismiss it would be to blaspheme against the human spirit.” That’s strong stuff but by the end I recognized the sentiment. I didn’t, by the way, think that this book about death and meaninglessness was “depressing.” Like I said, these days we’ve all kind of got that in our veins, between the lines of everything.* What was far more striking to me about The Plague was the fact that it knew this and was still hopeful, human-affirming. A grim and sober kind of hope – a mournful kind of hope – but extremely clear-eyed and thus more affecting than anything sentimental might have been.

I don’t always want all this in a book, and there are many sorts of things I often want out of a book that this did not provide, or provided only feebly. But what it was, it was with great force. Definitely one of the two or three best books I’ve ever read.

* Notice how I shrugged off The Floating Opera even as it said this seemingly shocking stuff, simply because it wasn’t well-written enough – nihilism itself gets a yawn, and trumping nihilism with more nihilism is just doodling.