One Fate

For the next few days we stay inside one book, the one where Camus thought hardest about what people owe each other. The Plague tells of a town, Oran, sealed off while an epidemic runs through it. By the middle of the novel the sickness has flattened every private difference. No longer were there individual destinies, Camus writes, only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.

Before the plague, the people of Oran were like us, each wrapped in a separate life, private plans, private loves, private schemes for getting ahead. The disease ends all that. Locked in together, cut off from the outside, they find that their fates have fused. The same fear, the same separation from absent loved ones, the same dull grief settles over everyone. What had felt like a city of strangers becomes, against its will, a single body sharing one condition.

Camus is not saying suffering is good. He is noticing something suffering reveals. The barriers we spend ordinary life maintaining, the sense that my story is mine and yours is yours, were never as solid as we thought. It takes a catastrophe to show it, but the truth was always there. We were sharing a destiny the whole time. We just had the luxury, most days, of not feeling it.

You do not need a plague to remember this. Any real trouble does it, a hospital waiting room, a flooded street, a town after a storm. Strangers turn to one another and the pretense drops. For a while, everyone knows they are in one story.

Today, look for the shared destiny hiding under an ordinary day. The people around you, on your street, in your building, are living the same weather, the same year, the same short life. Let yourself feel, just once, that it is one fate, not many.