The Plague

“The important thing,” Castel replied, “isn’t the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.”

some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach.

What’s important is for you to go out a bit. It’s a mistake staying indoors too much.”

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn’t waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

and what obscure motive had led him to risk his life for the sake of parading the streets on Sunday mornings.

A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure;

I can’t say I really know him, but one’s got to help a neighbor, hasn’t one?”

‘But I feel sure it’s not contagious,’ he hastened to assure me. “I told him it was all the same to me. “ ‘Ah, I understand, sir. You’re like me, you’re a fatalist.’ “I had said nothing of the kind and, what’s more, am not a fatalist.