The Heart Closes
“To fight abstraction you must have something of it in your own make-up. And in this feeling that his heart had slowly closed in on itself, the doctor found a solace, his only solace, for the almost unendurable burden of his days.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE PLAGUE
Months into the epidemic, Camus records something about Rieux that most stories about good people leave out. The doctor is going numb, and the numbness is keeping him upright.
The plague kills by abstraction. It does not care about any individual case. To fight something that general, day after day, Rieux has had to become somewhat general himself. He has stopped seeing each patient as a whole person with a name and a family, because a doctor who felt every death fully could not make the next house call.
Camus names this closing of the heart and then says something unexpected. He calls it a solace. Not a failure. Not a warning sign. The only comfort available to a man whose days have become almost unendurable.
This is an honest observation that most accounts of sustained effort refuse to make. We assume that the right way to do hard work is to feel all of it, always, and that numbness means something has gone wrong. Camus knew that people who persist through long difficulties often pay for their persistence with a kind of emotional flattening, and that the flattening is the price of staying, not a sign of cruelty.
If you are carrying something heavy over a long stretch, stop grading yourself on how much you feel while you carry it. Showing up is the measure.
