The end of La Peste

The ending is so rough.

Tarrou dies hard, watched over by Rieux and his mother, Rieux gets a telegram telling him his wife has died in the sanitarium, and Cottard freaks at the departure of the plague and starts shooting people out of his window.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Drove to the South Hills Village where I parked at the Food Court.

Took a walk outdoors, circumnavigating the parking lot.

Then drove to Riverside Park on the South Side on the Mon and parked in the shade of a tree with a view of the road, the river, and the Birmingham Bridge.

Read for a bit more than an hour, Camus, La Peste.

It was Tarrou's autobiographical speech about his rejection of killing and his bonding swim with Doctor Rieux.

Ringing bells, many and loud

Oran under lockdown in The Plague is in so many ways, right down to details of everyday life, similar to America - and probably any country at all, really - under lockdown in the face of Covid-19.

Isolation, quarantine, the suspension of wakes and funerals, the overwhelming of hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries, the end of so much of normal daily life, work-related or not.

It all feels so contemporary.

Two questions, confused

Le mythe de Sisyphe.

Camus writes as though life is worthwhile just in case it has meaning.

But the two claims are not generally equivalent.

The shepherd's pie at my local Cheesecake Factory is very worthwhile.

(Camus to the chef, with contempt: "Your shepherd's pie is meaningless.")

Two questions. Or is it three?

Sometimes philosophy is as ridiculous as religion, and its preoccupations just as fantastic. 

There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: the problem of suicide.

To judge whether life is or is not worth the trouble of being lived, that is to respond to the fundamental question of philosophy.

From Le mythe de Sisyphe, by Albert Camus.

The first two sentences, in fact.

My translation.

Can you believe it?

My freshman class were required to read this book the summer before we started at Holy Cross, the fall of 1967.

He writes a scant page later,

The meaning of life is the most pressing of questions.

Mon Dieu!

Freud reputedly said, "As soon as a man asks the meaning of life, he is sick."