I HAD ORDERED The Plague by Albert Camus on March 04. The coincidence is that after few days, this Corona Pandemic came into spotlight. While ordering, I knew no other thought than to read Albert Camus.

I’d say there is big similarity between Plague and Corona. Both are epidemics, both are highly contagious, both have shaken this world, both have pierced right into the whole humanity.

I finished reading the Plague today. I read it slow. He is Albert Camus and one should do no haste while reading him. He is like that one special coffee, which you have to sense the aroma, and savour slowly. As for the co-incidence, I read it in these days of an epidemic. When it comes to Camus, you live his world. Yet, I got to live his world in a similar situation of this Corona epidemic. Imagine having the best dark roast in the mists and fogs of a hill-station, that way this book fit today. I want to share a paragraph from his book. He wrote it for the ending pages of that epidemic.

Before that, I feel sad for those who are being sacrificed. Truly, one has to follow social distancing and quarantine strictly. I don’t care about politics and economics and egos. Please do it for your own and your own family.

Here is the Paragraph from The Plague by Albert Camus. Enjoy.

“Each was returning to his personal life, yet the sense of comradeship persisted and they were exchanging smiles and cheerful glances amongst themselves. But the moment they saw the smoke of the approaching engine, the feeling of exile vanished before an uprush of overpowering, bewildering joy. And, when the train stopped, all those interminable-seeming separations that often had begun on this same platform came to an end in one ecstatic moment, when arms closed with hungry possessiveness on bodies whose living shape they had forgotten. As for Rambert, he hadn’t time to see her running towards him; already she had flung herself upon his breast. And with his arms locked round her, pressing to his shoulder the head of which he saw only the familiar hair, he let his tears flow freely, unknowing if they rose from present joy or from sorrow too long repressed; aware only that they would prevent his making sure if the face buried in the hollow of his shoulders were the face of which he had dreamed so often and so often, or, instead a stranger’s face. For the moment, he wished to behave like all those others round him who believed, or made believe, that plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s heart.

– The Plague, Albert Camus