Something timely and timeless to Read this Sunday: Our Ways of Dealing with Pestilence

This is a time for solidarity and hope

Photo:quickenme.com

Good morning. Perhaps you have already read this book, La peste (The Plague) or you may have not heard about it. Reading about it myself the other day, I could not believe what I was reading. The words of this visionary author, Albert Camus, writing in the 1940s and its relevance to our current global pandemic crisis is nothing but prophetic.

“There are plagues, and there are victims, and it’s the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.”

“They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”

The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien has called La peste “a sermon of hope.” It’s worth revisiting that hopefulness – the spirit that prompts the Camus’s narrator to declare, famously, that plagues remind us “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”