Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > The Plague
The Plague
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The plague is a literal epidemic of the modern Bubonic Plague that sweeps through a town in Algeria.
And it is also figurative and symbolic - the African town, the colonial remnant of Oran, is “sealed off” as a result (as political powers seal us off nowadays, from obtrusive and disturbing Truth?) in a collective slumber of despair.
Sound familiar?
But guess what... within its sealed demesne, good men are doing active and physically-engaged Good Things within the vibrant frame of a new kind of postmodernist Faith - as Paul Tillich said, echoing Karl Barth - in a God beyond the worn-out bourgeois god.
They also have Faith in their own Elbow Grease, to tirelessly though humanly combat the insidious Evil of the Bubonic Threat.
Yes, the postwar years saw the Genesis of a plague-like, veiled, formless despair that still chills our thin twenty-first century blood, and Here it has been manfully faced and contained by A Few Good Men such as these!
They are not many, but they have boldly made the decision to Live and Work - Bodily and Humanly Incarnated in a Brutally Absurd World.
And we can do that for ourselves.
Now.
And avoid being bodiless, bloodless internet junkies of no apparent tangible good.
The forces of law, as in Camus’ symbolic postwar Algeria, try to stifle the truth with subtle thoughts of ingrained fearful and useless conditioning.
But brave men REFUSE not to act, even under the Paralysis of our modern day Plague... “ours is ONLY (and always) the Trying.”
A stark, gainless grappling with an Angel - for even Jacob was disabled for life by such combat...
But kept on fighting.
Excelsior.
Unlike so many of us others today, who have just Given Up.
But we, even when innocent children are senselessly dying in the plague’s pointless grip, though we reject the modern ersatz gods, we don’t give up, as Oran’s tireless doctor says.
For we are informed in our souls, nerve endings and stretched sinews by a vision that refuses to die:
Why listen to The Lies?
We can speak out for The Discarded Truth! And just watch for...
The vision of that infinite God beyond god that Refuses to Quit -
And refuses to just stand by, watching and helpless...
As His Angel disjoints us.
And it is also figurative and symbolic - the African town, the colonial remnant of Oran, is “sealed off” as a result (as political powers seal us off nowadays, from obtrusive and disturbing Truth?) in a collective slumber of despair.
Sound familiar?
But guess what... within its sealed demesne, good men are doing active and physically-engaged Good Things within the vibrant frame of a new kind of postmodernist Faith - as Paul Tillich said, echoing Karl Barth - in a God beyond the worn-out bourgeois god.
They also have Faith in their own Elbow Grease, to tirelessly though humanly combat the insidious Evil of the Bubonic Threat.
Yes, the postwar years saw the Genesis of a plague-like, veiled, formless despair that still chills our thin twenty-first century blood, and Here it has been manfully faced and contained by A Few Good Men such as these!
They are not many, but they have boldly made the decision to Live and Work - Bodily and Humanly Incarnated in a Brutally Absurd World.
And we can do that for ourselves.
Now.
And avoid being bodiless, bloodless internet junkies of no apparent tangible good.
The forces of law, as in Camus’ symbolic postwar Algeria, try to stifle the truth with subtle thoughts of ingrained fearful and useless conditioning.
But brave men REFUSE not to act, even under the Paralysis of our modern day Plague... “ours is ONLY (and always) the Trying.”
A stark, gainless grappling with an Angel - for even Jacob was disabled for life by such combat...
But kept on fighting.
Excelsior.
Unlike so many of us others today, who have just Given Up.
But we, even when innocent children are senselessly dying in the plague’s pointless grip, though we reject the modern ersatz gods, we don’t give up, as Oran’s tireless doctor says.
For we are informed in our souls, nerve endings and stretched sinews by a vision that refuses to die:
Why listen to The Lies?
We can speak out for The Discarded Truth! And just watch for...
The vision of that infinite God beyond god that Refuses to Quit -
And refuses to just stand by, watching and helpless...
As His Angel disjoints us.
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Finished Reading
January 4, 2020
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Zoeb
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Mar 09, 2020 04:41AM
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Coming from English lit, spoiled by the wit of Donne and Shakespeare, Austen and George Eliot, I'm not happy to read depressing modern novels--a continental specialty, with all the great modern women novelists in Italy (where my older daughter lives) are depressing. Of course, sexism in Italy is legendary, so probably they should be depressing, BUT witty overcoming of so-called failure--as Austen overcame the fact she was not married-- is my desire for prose. And of course, plenty of continental wit and comedy, Moliere and Pirandello, for a start.
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On the one hand, "There is no God coming to help us - just us humans - what are we going to do about it?" is threaded into the core of this book in a manner that I think you just can't sever. So why, on the other hand, is there something about the ethos - the idealism, or maybe just the psychology - of Christianity, that feels comfortably at home and at harmony with the book?
I'm glad to see you rated this book highly and have spared a few words on this puzzle.
The chief characters of this book are heroes of conviction and action. You made a great summary of their role by crediting them for resolving to toil and work - and therefore to be bodily incarnate - in a "brutally absurd world". (an apt, concise wrapping.)
The plague itself, you also say, is, by these heroes, faced and contained. Faced, yes, definitely. Contained - it'd seem not. They are powerless to control the plague itself, it comes in and out like the tide. But the abyssal flavor of horror it brings with it is combatted by their actions. They offer (or do they create?) a sort of alternative. So while they cannot control the plague biologically, maybe they can contain it symbolically.
Camus seems to stand alone among the thinkers and writers of his wave, in offering an existentialism that actually comports with something about the driving essence (albeit, not the metaphysics) of religion. That's just my take at a glance; I have a lot of reading and discovering yet to do...