Courage in the face of adversity

Albert Camus. (Photo Creative Commons from DietrichLiao on Flickr.)

These are tough times. But they’re not the first and the past, as always, can be instructive.

Recently, I picked up Albert Camus’ 1948 classic “The Plague” and I’m very happy I did. I hadn’t read it since college and my memory was beyond hazy. I did remember that its main character was a doctor (Bernard Rieux) and that it was about his struggle against an epidemic of bubonic plague in the French Algerian city of Oran; how he carried on, exhausted but determined, in the face of odds that grew more impossible by the hour.

You’d think it would have occurred to me to read this a few years ago when we had a deadly, global plague of our own. But I’ve always been a little slow on the uptake and this was no exception. Besides, a lot of the smartest people I know are feeling overwhelmed and fighting despair right now. As I remembered “The Plague,” it was about the philosophy/morality/ethics of staying in the fight when the odds against you seem most daunting.

Rereading the book, this seemed to be the main point. 

Behind the story, of course, is an author, a French Algerian one who just five years before had gone to Nazi-occupied Paris, started the book, and became editor-in-chief of Combat, an underground newspaper of the French resistance.

“Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night,” Camus wrote in it, according to a bunch of websites. “Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom’s barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men’s blood.”

He was writing to capture a moment. But he was also trying to inspire by describing the stakes: blood sacrifice to secure freedom’s barricades. When they’re that high, it’s hard to justify not doing what you can, I think he’s saying.

In the mid-90s, I got an idea just how important a newspaper can be to an imperiled community. Just after the four-year Siege of Sarajevo, I was at a journalism convention in D.C. A grizzled reporter described how Bosnian Serbs laying siege to the hurled artillery shells into the newspaper building, leveling it floor by floor until he and his colleagues were literally working underground, laboring by candlelight to type and mimeograph what few copies of the paper they could muster. Then he and the others would brave sniper fire to drop and post them around the city.

The name of the paper? Oslobodjenje, or “Liberation” in English. According to its reporter, the community saw it as liberation and more — a way of knowing what was happening to their neighbors and of knowing they weren’t alone in their suffering. That despite or because of it all, they were proud, resilient. They had an identity. 

The reporter said the hunger for their work was so great that copies would pass from reader to reader until they fell apart.

Those details are indelible to me. Something so important that it’s worth risking your life to produce and disseminate or to obtain and read. To read until it crumbles.

Certainly in Camus’ occupied Paris, nothing very good was going to come if Nazi thugs found you even in possession of Combat, much less writing and printing the thing. But print it they did, to obvious effect.

It seems to me that that’s what Camus was really getting at in “The Plague.” It’s a study of how people react when they’re confronted with calamities so big they can’t be ignored.

There’s Cottard, the man who’s committed an unnamed crime. Alone in the city, he’s pleased by the pestilence, thinking the cops will be too preoccupied to go looking for him. Concerned chiefly with himself, he’s a character who resonates in our current situation. But then there’s a bit of justice. When the pestilence ends, Cottard goes mad.

There’s the Parisian journalist Rambert. Just happening to be in Oran at the outbreak, he at first schemes obsessively to get back to his new wife. He tries to justify his selfish pursuit of personal happiness in the face of the calamity, and Dr. Rieux doesn’t argue with him. But then the journalist has an epiphany and passes up a chance at escape to work tirelessly at Rieux’s side.

And there’s Father Paneloux, who first reacts to the outbreak by exhorting that it’s God’s rightful judgement on a sinful people. As he cares for its victims, he softens toward them, but not toward his faith or himself. Declaring all or nothing, he invests all in his faith, refuses treatment when he gets sick, and dies.

Most important is Dr. Rieux. He sees nothing heroic in what he’s doing. He’s trained as a healer. He’s in a place full of people who need healing. So in his mind, his duty is clear. The other characters take their cues from him.

It would be hazardous for a layman such as myself to over-interpret one of the great novels of the 20th century. So I’ll confine myself to this: Camus was writing during and just after a time when democracy and any real notion of freedom were under grave threat. He was on the front lines of that fight at a time and in a place that must have, more than once, caused him to despair of his cause. He fought on by putting out his vital newspaper and then he wrote this book. Others in and around the resistance did the things they could — big and little — to sustain a community that existed beyond cruelty and madness. For many, that surely consisted of just being decent to those around them.

Seems to me that we moderns might learn something here. Instead of just moaning in despair, we all need to do our bit, no matter how humble, to do good, be good, talk to people with whom we might not think we agree, make things better. One of those little things is writing, reading, and doing our best to share the truth.

For now, anyway, in the United States, no great physical dangers confront publishers and readers of independent journalism. But one wonders whether good information can be heard over the sinister din raised by our current crop of tech-mogul Cottards. We all have to keep at it.