It Takes a Plague to Raise a Village

Lately considering all the moments from Camus' The Plague where the description of a character or event becomes so perfectly clear that it seems to be hacked away from the rest of the narrative and just standing there gleaming in a good, clean light.

For example, just starting out, within the first hundred words or so, before he has even an ounce of our trust, the narrator asks us to conjure up a town without pigeons. And I am steady, steadier, than fiction.

He says things like "what is needed is imagination," not "order."

"Her father," meanwhile, "was a railroadman. When off duty, he spent most of his time seated in a corner beside the window gazing meditatively at the passers-by, his enormous hands splayed out on his thighs."

That's exactly it, I think to myself. That's not my father or my friend but this particular man.

If we could see life like that, as a series of impressions stacked up clean, not to be judged but maybe just . . .

If we could cultivate a kind of . . . to see each passing thing without encumbrance, without horror or passion. Without pessimism or the "what's it to me" that sucks blood and pounds breath.

I will stay with this book a long time, practicing the kind of slow reading that returns books to their truest place: risk, the risk of unsettling, the risk of taking it all too seriously. Changing life.

I can't remember anymore if this is a good thing, a terrible thing.

"These were the people, no doubt, whom one often saw wandering forlornly in the dusty town at all hours of the day, silently invoking nightfalls known to them alone and the daysprings of their happier land."