One Fate
“No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE PLAGUE
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.
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 never says suffering is good. He is noticing what suffering reveals. The barriers we spend ordinary life maintaining were never as solid as we thought. We were sharing a destiny the whole time, and merely had the luxury 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.
There is a shared destiny hiding under an ordinary day. The people 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 and not many.
