DiscussMormonism.com

I'm copying this over from the backup board.

Before the board went down MeDotOrg had mentioned trying to track down a copy of Camus' The Plague. I had forgotten that book until he mentioned it, recalled liking it when I read it sometime around 2000 or so, but other than the final paragraph didn't recall else by way of details. But his bringing it up touched some latent idea it had left behind that it was a perfect fictional truth for the times we are living in. So I dusted off the old paperback copy I had kept for 20 years against the advice of many decluttering experts, and got reacquainted with it. It was and is a good read, and better visiting it now with 20 odd years of additional life experience behind me. I also have to say, the change from being a believing LDS member to not so much anything made a big difference, but it wasn't the most important difference.

Anyway, I ended up needing to finish it using an audiobook due to reasons and found a free copy on YouTube I thought I'd share in case anyone else benefits from the find.

https://youtu.be/vnwFB94lkG4

And if you are curious about it but don't want to just read or give it a listen, here's a good article on it from our coronavirus hardened worldview:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opin ... lague.html

Enjoy. And someday, perhaps the seeds from this reading too will send the rats of memory up into the streets of ones mind during a future global tragedy to rise in relevance in another twenty years. But let's hope not, for our kids sakes.

Thought I'd post this follow-up article to the one I noted in the OP. The additional discussion is interesting.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect-podc ... t-zaretsky

Some snippets:

I wrote about The Plague back in March, but I wanted to dive a little deeper into its meaning and significance. So I spoke with Robert Zaretsky, a philosopher and historian at the University of Houston, for Future Perfect’s new limited-series podcast, The Way Through, which is all about exploring the world’s greatest philosophical and spiritual traditions for guidance during these difficult times.

This is a conversation about the existentialist philosophy behind The Plague and what it has to say to us today. We talk about the symbolism of the novel and the moral lessons it can offer us in this moment of sickness and racial unrest. We also discuss why the coronavirus pandemic, as awful as it is, highlights a permanent truth about our vulnerabilities and our mutual interdependence.

...

In many ways, The Plague anticipates not just what’s taking place in the United States today but what has taken place over the course of decades, ever since 1947. The civil rights movement, for example. Or the pressure in occupied Europe behind the Iron Curtain. That finally led to that tipping point in 1989 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the implosion of the Soviet Union. It serves as a kind of template, this wonderfully compelling and complex template, of the ways in which people respond to governments or forces that pose a threat to their dignity and to their integrity as human beings.

And so, on the one hand, what is taking place right now in the United States in regard to Black Lives Matter is quite extraordinary, and it’s something that I think would please Camus. But I think Camus would also be worried about the excesses of the response to George Floyd’s murder. This is something that he examines in great detail in the essay The Rebel, which is the philosophical pendant to The Plague.

Camus makes the case that rebellion is distinct from revolution. The rebel is not the revolutionary. The rebel, in fact, is a moderate. It’s somebody who insists, on the one hand, on telling that individual or that institution that “Here the line must be drawn. You cannot do this to me.”

But at the same time, Camus insists that we have to see the humanity of those who are attempting to steal our dignity or our life. And it requires tremendous exertion to hold the balance between becoming a revolutionary and doing what revolutionaries always do, which is yielding to abstractions and forgetting the human costs involved, or becoming apathetic and resigned to the way things are.