The Plague

Albert Camus, Stuart Gilbert (Translator)

The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947.

It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author’s distinctive absurdist point of view.

The book tells a gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus’ objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka’s, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.

About the author

Albert Camus

Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature.

Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work.

He also adapted plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Requiem for a Nun of William Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l’Equipe, an Algerian group, whose “collective creation” Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest, he came at the age of 25 years in 1938; only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation served as a columnist for the newspaper Combat.

The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds notion of acceptance of the absurd of Camus with “the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement – and a conscious dissatisfaction.”
Meursault, central character of L’Étranger (The Stranger), 1942, illustrates much of this essay: man as the nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later – when the young killer faces execution – tempted by despair, hope, and salvation.

Besides his fiction and essays, Camus very actively produced plays in the theater (e.g., Caligula, 1944).

The time demanded his response, chiefly in his activities, but in 1947, Camus retired from political journalism.

Doctor Rieux of La Peste (The Plague), 1947, who tirelessly attends the plague-stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of injustice, and confirms words: “We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.”

People also well know La Chute (The Fall), work of Camus in 1956.

Camus authored L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom) in 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He styled of great purity, intense concentration, and rationality.

Camus died at the age of 46 years in a car accident near Sens in le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin.

(Goodreads.com)

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the question that gets at the heart of why we make poems (or paintings or novels or songs) — a question fundamentally about what it means to be human.

I asked an elder poet friend why she thought chatGPT rang hollow where Whitman could compact infinities of feeling in a single image, could unseat the soul in a word.

She paused, then said: “Because AI hasn’t suffered.”

On the one hand, this echoes a dangerous myth: the archetype of the tortured genius handed down to us by the Romantics, who, cornered in their time and place, in a century of bloody revolutions, deadly epidemics, and punitive Puritanical norms, must have needed to believe that their suffering — those lives of poverty and privation, those ill-fated exercises in projection mistaken for love, all those premature deaths — was a fair price to pay for such creative volcanicity.

On the other hand, this is reality: Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without. It is these painful convolutions of the psyche — which used to be termed neurosis at the dawn of modern psychotherapy, and which we may simply call suffering — that reveal us to ourselves, and it is out of these revelations that we create anything capable of touching other lives, that contact we call art.

Our power and our freedom lie in learning to neither negate our suffering nor romanticize it but to harness its catalytic power as a current passing through us to jolt us alive, then passing on and down into the ground of being.

Carl Jung

No one has refuted the myth of the tortured genius without negating the fact and fertility of suffering more pointedly than Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961), who thought deeply about the nature of creativity.

In 1943, a scholar of Kierkegaard asked Jung’s opinion of the relationship between “psychological problems” and creative genius. With an eye to Kierkegaard’s gift for letting his anxiety fuel rather than hinder his creativity, Jung declares him a “whole” person and not “a jangling hither and dither of displeasing fragmentary souls,” and writes:

True creative genius does not let itself be spoilt by analysis, but is freed from the impediments and distortions of a neurosis. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth — part of the general lunacy of our time.

It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic. Nietzsche’s syphilitic infection undoubtedly exerted a strongly neuroticizing influence on his life. But one could imagine a sound Nietzsche possessed of creative power without hypertension — something like Goethe. He would have written much the same as he did, but less strident, less shrill — i.e., less German — more restrained, more responsible, more reasonable and reverent.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

A century before Alain de Botton offered his assuring perspective on the importance of breakdowns, Jung weighs what makes suffering generative or degenerative:

Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase — a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Neurosis is a protracted crisis degenerated into a habit, the daily catastrophe ready for use.

Jung considers the advice he would have given Kierkegaard about how to orient to his suffering, which was the raw material of his philosophical writings:

It doesn’t matter what you say, but what it says in you. To it you must address your answers. God is straightaway with you and is the voice within you. You have to have it out with that voice.

Couple with a forgotten young poet’s extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson about how to bear your suffering, then revisit Kierkegaard himself on the value of despair.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Is Peace Possible? is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages.

How ungenerous our culture has been in portraying science as cold, unfeeling, and aloof from the human sphere. No — to live a life of science is to live so wonder-smitten by reality, by the majesty and mystery of nature, that the willful destruction of any fragment of it becomes unconscionable. It is impossible to study the building blocks of life without reverence for life itself, impossible to devote one’s days to the enigma of a single element or elementary particle without venerating the inviolable cohesion of the universe. There is a kind of innocent exhilaration to this sense of wonder, and a quiet ethic. It may well be our greatest antidote to self-destruction.

This exuberance drove Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971) to regularly run the last few yards to her laboratory, to puzzle over differential equations throughout her pregnancies and take her calculations into the maternity ward.

Dame Kathleen Lonsdale. (Photograph: Walter Stoneman. National Portrait Gallery.)

The tenth child in a Quaker household without electricity, she was born in Ireland the year the Wright brothers built and flew humanity’s first successful flying machine heavier than air. Her home was still lit by gas when she first began studying science — in a school for boys, because no such subjects figured into the curriculum of the local girls’ school. By the time she was a teenager, living outside London, she watched gas-filled zeppelins rain bombs and death from the air. She watched them plummet in flames, shot down by British weapons. She watched her mother cry with the knowledge that piloting them were German boys not much older than Kathleen.

After attaining a higher score in physics than any London University student ever had, she joined the Cambridge laboratory of J. D. Bernal — the first scientist to apply X-ray crystallography to the molecules of life. He came to see how beneath her quiet, unassuming manner lay “such an underlying strength of character that she became from the outset the presiding genius of the place.” Soon, she was pioneering uses of X-ray crystallography that would fuel the chemistry of the century to come: still in her twenties, Lonsdale illuminated the shape, dimensions, and atomic structure of the benzene ring that had mystified chemists since Michael Faraday discovered benzene a century earlier.

The first woman tenured at London’s most venerated research university and the first female president of both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Union of Crystallography, Lonsdale was also one of the twentieth century’s most lucid, impassioned, and indefatigable activists against our civilizational cult of war and the military industrial complex’s funding its planet-sized house of worship. By the time the next World War broke out, Lonsdale — by then one of the world’s preeminent scientists — was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to military conscription. She went on to become one of Europe’s most influential prison reformers, recognizing that the prison industrial complex is the price societies governed by the military industrial complex pay for the inequalities and injustices stemming from that foundational cult.

Lonsdale wrote Is Peace Possible? in 1957 as part of a Penguin series that invited some of the era’s most lucid and luminous minds to reckon with some of the era’s most urgent questions. It is perspectival and prophetic. “History teaches us that time can bring about reconciliations that seemed at another time impossible, but only when violence has ceased, whether by agreement or through exhaustion,” Lonsdale writes in the middle of the Cold War that never erupted into the nuclear holocaust it could have been, largely thanks to the Pugwash Conference for nuclear disarmament, in which she was involved and which reached agreements thought unimaginable. It is difficult today to imagine how real the doom felt to the children ducking under school desks, how improbable its aversion given the geopolitical forces at play — and yet here we are, survivors of an abated apocalypse, here to tell its story: the story of the triumph of the possible over the probable, the triumph of peace.

Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace

Bridging the spiritual ethos of her upbringing with the scientific worldview of her calling and training, Lonsdale challenges the misconception of pacifism as the simplistic idea that a perfect and peaceful world is merely a matter of individuals refusing to fight. “Truisms based on Utopias are poor arguments,” she observes, instead invoking the style of pacifism native to the Quaker tradition and its original formulation in 1660 as the refusal to partake of “all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatever.” Peace, she argues, is the product of the recognition “that war is spiritually degrading, that it is the wrong way to settle disputes between classes or nations, the wrong way to meet aggression or oppression, the wrong way to preserve national or personal ideals.” It is wrong not merely in a philosophical sense but in a practical sense, for we are far too interdependent to harm another without harming ourselves. To illustrate the interleaving of lives across the artificial pickets of national borders, she looks back on the 1947 cholera epidemic that quickly came to claim five hundred lives per day in Egypt but was also quickly curbed after twenty nations cooperated on a supply line for vaccines. In a sentiment of staggering timeliness in the wake of the twenty-first century’s deadliest pandemic, Lonsdale observes that “plagues are no respecters of sovereignty,” nor are the far-reaching economic, moral, spiritual, and radioactive consequences of war.

Ultimately, Lonsdale indicts the underlying reason for the existence of war lurking beneath all surface conflicts: Military alliances and international treaties only gauze the open wound of widespread inequality and injustice that colonialism and capitalism have inflicted on our world. “Real security can only be found, if at all, in a world without the injustices that now exist, and without arms,” she insists. At the heart of her slender masterwork of moral courage is a vision for how such a world might be possible:

There are two ways in which such changes might come. One is the way of the compulsion of experience, the whip and spur of historical inevitability, the coercion of facts. That is the hard and bitter way. The other is the way of foresight, of preparation, of imagination. It is also the way of moral compulsion. It may be no less hard but it is not bitter.

Lonsdale’s words abide, indict, incite:

Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.

By Hazrat Inayat Khan

I asked for strength,
and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom,
and God gave me problems to learn to solve.
I asked for prosperity,
and God gave me a brain and brawn to work.
I asked for courage,
and God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for love,
and God gave me people to help.
I asked for favors,
and God gave me opportunities.
I received nothing I wanted.
I received everything I needed.

[I asked for Truth,
and You gave me sense testimony to Translate.–m.z.]

Inayat Khan Rehmat Khan (July 5, 1882 – February 5, 1927) was an Indian professor of musicology, singer, exponent of the saraswati vina, poet, philosopher, and pioneer of the transmission of Sufism to the West. Wikipedia

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel • May 23, 2025 At an event organized by the Middle East Children’s Alliance in New York City, Gabor Maté discusses the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the moral and emotional confusion it has brought forth. Because Gabor often has “no words” for these atrocities, he pulls on the wisdom and insight of Muslim intellectuals and writers on the issue, presciently encapsulating the complex and painful realities of the genocide. Support my independent journalism at Substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/ Follow me on social media: https://linktr.ee/chrishedges

“There’s no business like Shoah business.”

–Gabor Maté

New Thinking • May 23, 2025 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1992. It will remain public for only one week.  What is the origin of individual behavior and personality? Stanislav Grof proposes that individuals have systems of condensed experience (COEX systems) which become anchored to aspects of the birth trauma. He describes four different basic stages of the birth process and shows how they relate to attitudes developed later in life. Stanislav Grof is author of LSD Psychotherapy, Beyond the Brain, and The Adventure of Self-Discovery and co-author of The Human Encounter with Death. A former professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, he was scholar in residence for fourteen years at the Esalen Institute. With his late wife, Christina Grof, he has developed a psychotherapeutic approach known as Holotropic Therapy. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.

Google AI Overview

Stanislav Grof identified four Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs), which correspond to the four stages of biological birth: BPM I (pre-birth in the womb), BPM II (the start of labor, cervix not yet dilated), BPM III (the baby moving through the birth canal), and BPM IV (birth and being outside the womb). These matrices also have corresponding spiritual and psychological counterparts, and Grof believed they play a significant role in shaping our lives and experiences. 

Here’s a more detailed breakdown: 

• BPM I (Pre-birth in the Womb):.Opens in new tabThis stage is characterized by a sense of cosmic unity and peace, or a “good womb” experience.
• BPM II (Start of Labor, Cervix Not Yet Dilated):.Opens in new tabThis stage is associated with feelings of being pushed against a closed, unyielding barrier, potentially leading to experiences of fear, claustrophobia, or existential angst.
• BPM III (Baby Moving Through the Birth Canal):.Opens in new tabThis stage is characterized by a struggle or a “death-rebirth” experience, as the baby moves through the birth canal.
• BPM IV (Birth and Being Outside the Womb):.Opens in new tabThis stage represents the emergence into the world, often associated with a sense of ego death and rebirth.

AI responses may include mistakes.

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • May 24, 2025 Loyd Auerbach, MS, received his masters’ degree in parapsychology from John F. Kennedy University. He is author of Mind Over Matter; ESP, Hauntings, and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist’s Handbook;  Psychic Dreaming: Dreamworking, Reincarnation, Out-of-Body Experiences & Clairvoyance; and Ghost Hunting: How to Investigate the Paranormal. He is co-author (with Ed May, Joseph McMoneagle, and Victor Rubel) of ESP Wars: East and West. He is the Director of the Office of Paranormal Investigations. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Rhine Research Center. His website is https://loydauerbach.com/ In this interview, rebooted for 2019, he points out that disagreement still exists among researchers as to whether or not dreams are meaningful. Psychic dreams typically feel different than other dreams. They are frequently described as “more real than real”. Nuances concerning precognitive dreams are presented. Such dreams can be life-changing – usually, but not always, in positive ways. The discussion focuses on the relationship between dream states, hypnotic states, and meditative states – leading to questions about the nature of consciousness itself. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on June 11, 2019)

HISTORY • Jan 11, 2025 Colombus has an other-worldly experience as he traverses the Atlantic, in this scene from Season 2, “Ancient Close Encounters.”

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

Here Stanislav Grof presents a useful model of the psyche, extended by his thirty years of studying non-ordinary states of consciousness. It is useful for understanding such phenomena as shamanism, mysticism, psychedelic states, spontaneous visionary experiences, and psychotic episodes. This book might have been entitled Beyond Drugs. The second part describes the principles and processes of the non-pharmacological technique developed by the author and his late wife, Christina, for self-exploration and psychotherapy. 

---

Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach shows you how to identify telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and other psi experiences as they occur through dreams. Discover dream incubation, lucid dreaming, and symbol interpretation to solve problems, relieve stress, confront your fears, and overcome nightmares. Use your dreams to create psychic connections with your loved ones, and explore other points in time and space to create a complete picture of the person you are, the person you have been, and the person you will be in the future.

---

At its core, this work presents a refreshing synthesis of modern psychological theory and the enduring relevance of Swedenborg’s 18th-century spiritual philosophy. The authors skillfully demonstrate how IFS, a cutting-edge therapeutic model developed by Richard Schwartz, aligns with and is enriched by Swedenborg’s spiritual teachings. This unexpected pairing yields fresh insights into the nature of the human mind and spirit, providing readers with a comprehensive approach to understanding and nurturing their inner world.

---

The Entity Letters describes a years-long sociological investigation of a sitter group that witnessed table movements, table levitations, poltergeist phenomena, earthquake effects, and other startling physical events. The group was known as the Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT), founded in 1961 by John G. Neihardt, the famous poet and author of the best-selling book Black Elk Speaks.