Meditations On The Plague

Albert Camus' philosophical novel, 'La Peste', is being read voraciously all over the world at the moment.  Written in 1947 it resonates with us today in a way Camus would probably never have imagined.  In this podcast we hear excerpts of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1957 in which he describes the role of the writer in a world under constant threat by malign forces.  As we make the first tentative steps to come out of lockdown and emerge into a world where we will be living with an ongoing pandemic for the foreseeable future, I asked three academics to look at the lessons we can take from and parallels we can see in plagues from the past, using 'La Peste' as a springboard.  This is a montage of their reflections which are diverse but complementary and their message, like Camus', is one of guarded optimism.  
 We hear from Professor Rosemary Lloyd, Fellow Emerita of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and Professor Emerita in French at Indiana University, Dr. Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and former Archbishop of Canterbury and Mark Bailey, Professor of Late Medieval History at the University of East Anglia and High Master of St. Paul's School.  Professor Bailey delivered the James Ford Lectures at Oxford University in 2019 on his specialist subject of thirty years, the Black Death, 'The End of Serfdom and The Rise of The West'.      

The excerpts from Camus' speech concerning the role of the writer translate as follows:
'Art, in my view, is not a solitary pleasure.  It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth.' 
'..the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.'
'..the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.' 
'Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.' 
'Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.'

The full speech is available on the Nobel Prize website at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/speech/
With many thanks to the Nobel Prize organisation for the use of excerpts of Albert Camus' speech and the photograph from their archive.
Many thanks to Ian Claussen, freelance existentialist, for translating and reading the passage at the beginning of the podcast from 'La Peste' and to the Estate of Albert Camus for allowing use of this extract.
Piano: Tamás Vásáry playing Frédéric Chopin's 'Nocturne Op. 09 Andante in E flat major' (Internet Archive)