It Never Disappears
“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE PLAGUE
The city is celebrating. The gates are open, the epidemic is over, people are dancing in the streets. Rieux stands in the middle of it knowing what they do not. The bacillus does not die. It waits in furniture and linen, patient, for years, and one day it will send its rats back out into a happy city.
Camus was not writing only about disease. He had just watched fascism defeated and knew perfectly well that the conditions which produced it were all still present. Victory parades tend to imply that a problem has been solved permanently. Very few problems work that way.
This could be a bleak note on which to end a novel, and Camus chose it deliberately. But read it again and it is not despair. It is the reason for this whole month. If the plague were permanently curable, persistence would be a temporary virtue you could eventually retire from. Because it is not, vigilance becomes a way of living rather than an emergency measure.
The work is not going to be finished. That is not a failure of the work.
Look at something you declared handled a while ago. Go and check on it.
