“Utter solitude. In the urinal of a major railway station at 1 a.m.” – Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951
“Tenderness and style are still the best gestures we can make in the face of death.” – Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
“Did you know rats have sex 20 times a day?” I ask my fiancé as I boil water for pasta. I have spent the day reading through everything plague, epidemic and illness-related in the New York Review archives. Rat fucking aside, the most astonishing fact is one apparently well-known: that the Black Death recurred off and on for three hundred years.
It’s hard for me to square this figure with the way that I experience the world online. Where “ah shit, here we go again” has come to mean that thing that happened two weeks ago (which feels like two years ago) and not an invisible enemy that has been striking down cities for several generations.
The Internet flattens the before and after of major events, in the sense that the moment, the post-moment and the post post-moment are islands in the same stream of updates. In the words of the writer Laurie Stone, who has established a new genre of Facebook updates: “I don't think life will be recognizable after the era of the virus becomes the era of what that era will be called.” My friend Charlotte Shane put it better than I possibly could: “If you believe we have entered the crack between a before and an after, you are not alone.” I am well within that crack, albeit in the Internet’s timezone.
In the Review archives, I was specifically looking for references to Albert Camus and his topical 1947 novel, The Plague. My strongest memory of Camus is an aesthetic one. Around 2014, I saw a set of Camus books in the Strand with geometric black and white covers by Helen Yentus. The pleasure of seeing them grouped together was akin to lust.
During that same period, my go-to heartbreak music was 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields. In the song I Don’t Want to Get Over You, frontman Stephin Merritt suggests “I could make a career of being blue/I could dress in black and read Camus,” among his list of numbing agents.
Camus is a patron saint of the numb. Writing about Camus’s notebooks in 1965, Paul de Man suggests, “Camus’s concern for others is always protective: he wants to keep intact a potential happiness, a possible fulfillment that every individual carries within him.” In other words, the allegory of The Plague (addressing the French resistance during WWII) is a moral framework not of right or wrong, but of what is best for the individual’s relationship with nature– which happens to require resisting fascism in this case.
When I entered high school, I started a year ahead in French because I studied it from kindergarten to eighth grade. This meant that my only way to continue my studies past a certain point was one on one with my French teacher, a severe woman. Her hair was dyed yellow and styled somewhere between Princess Diana and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little aviator. She wore electric blue eyeliner every day that looked like it was tattooed on and houndstooth skirt suits with big, bulbous jewelry. I don’t know if the suits were Chanel; She wore them like they were. (How someone like that ends up teaching French at a public school in suburban Massachusetts is beyond me. Sadly, I will never know how or why. She is the type of person that doesn’t appear anywhere online. I do know that, having been exposed to her, the Duolingo owl will never scare me.)
And that is how I came to read L'Étranger aloud, haltingly, in her empty classroom. I'm not sure how many times we met like this. I have the bad habit of falling into a half-trance when language study is too far out of my depth. “Marguerite! Wake up!”
I read Camus but I did not understand. I could not process the French and form the French at the same time. So I have known Camus as sex (by way of book cover), and sexual disappointment (by way of heartbreak), and I have also known him in solitude– the way he knew himself.
Ironically, when I lived in North Africa (Morocco, not Camus’s Algeria), it was French that bubbled to the tip of my tongue. Although I was there to study Arabic, I found myself in the same half-trance of a sustained language block which could only be broken with the remnants of high school French. I remember reading Tender Is the Night on the train from Rabat to Casablanca, a tiny rebellion against the Paul Bowles books that dominated the English library at the language center where I was studying.
Fitzgerald’s book takes place at a Swiss psychiatric clinic, a detail that came to mind today when I read that the worldwide decrease in tuberculosis led to the closure of tuberculosis sanatoriums in places like Davos, and that these sanitariums have since been converted to resorts. As one particularly dystopian image suggests, the height of coronavirus might require the reverse conversion of hotels and motels into recovery facilities.
The images of coronavirus disaster are not as emotionally accessible as the images of another disaster which occurred last year, the partial destruction of Notre Dame. In fact, the largest outpouring of emotions in the processing of the pandemic online have come from footage of Italians singing on their balconies. And in the case of Notre Dame, from the crowds singing hymns outside of the smoldering church. Those images reminded me of a 1940s LIFE magazine photograph, known as the crying Frenchman. A man cries as the French flag is moved to the country’s North African colonies ahead of the inevitable Nazi invasion. The caption reads, “a Frenchman sheds tears of patriotic grief as the flags of his country’s last regiments are exiled to Africa.”
It’s a heartbreaking photo, all the more heartbreaking when you consider that the safe harbor of the French colors is territory that had already been invaded by the French themselves. And who weeps for them? Camus’s stranger is a Frenchman in Algeria. But a Frenchman is welcome in Algeria. It is an Algerian man who is considered foreign and suspect by the Western powers– then and now. In the movie Casablanca, the exiles of Vichy France rise and sing the La Marseillaise in defiance of the Nazi invaders. It is a triumph of the human spirit. But whose spirit? Rick's Café is on colonial land.
When I visited Casablanca, it was around the same time that the city’s Morocco Mall opened. The mall was heralded into being with a performance by JLo and a party featuring bottles of Dom Perignon—an odd choice in a country where Muslims are forbidden to drink. There is a souk within the mall selling upscale versions of the crafts commonly sold in the medina. A French department store, the same store which dispenses gold nuggets from an ATM in Dubai, advertised itself as "bringing France back to Morocco".
In the early days of its opening, rumors circulated that the mall was haunted. The mall’s management was sufficiently rattled by the rumors as to address it head on. They rejected the gossip unequivocally: “It is distressing to note that in the 21st century, our detractors still use arguments which seek to maintain our compatriots in the darkness.” (Without giving too much away, I was reminded of this ‘haunted’ luxury building when I watched the film Atlantique.)
A video promotion for the Casablanca venture showed the mall populated by Sims-like visitors, a couple and their two children. The mother comes in wearing a traditional djellaba, but partway through the video has changed to a white shirt and red pants. (More on that.)
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In 2017, anti-immigrant protesters burned 42 palm trees which had been planted near Milan’s Duomo (with sponsorship from none other than Starbucks). It was a protest against non-native species as an avatar for non-native peoples. And yet, weren't palm trees Italian enough when they were collected by aristocrats? Weren't they Italian enough when they grew in Libya under Italy’s 20th century administration?
Earlier this year, the BBC reported that Australia is culling its feral camel population, a species brought to the continent by the British from Asia and the Middle East. Before the Civil War, the United States experimented with using camels to aid their Westward expansion. I am thinking about the word vector, and how everything we term invasive points back at us. In Italy, the image of the dread Hannibal crossing the alps with elephants looms large. However, 11,000 years ago dwarf elephants, the size of adult pigs, roamed Sicily and briefly coexisted with humans before humans did what humans always do.
That was at the end of the last Ice Age. The Little Ice Age, which lasted from the 16th to 19th centuries, exacerbated the effects of the Black Death. The cooling climate impacted crops which led to a Great Famine, weakening the immune systems of Europe’s inhabitants. It also led to the River Thames frost fairs, which Virginia Woolf describes in Orlando as "a carnival of the utmost brilliancy."
According to the BBC, the ice was so thick during one such fair that an elephant was marched across the Thames.
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In his 1947 essay The Rains of New York, Camus describes New York City as a “prison by day and funeral pyre by night.”
Right now we are enduring isolation to avoid the pyre. But we are far from prisoners. As Kim Kelly reports, prisoners on Rikers will be the ones to bury the dead if coronavirus spirals out of control– a prison ‘job’ that has traditionally paid $1 an hour. Even during the Justinian plague, when contract laborers were hired from other regions to bury the dead they were paid a king’s ransom. Why have more tears been shed over Notre Dame than the people who cannot afford bail?
My favorite thing to revisit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection is a petrified lemon. It is little more than a glorified turd, and yet it was taken from Egypt in the 1920s, excavated by the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The lemon reminds me of the mundanity of wealth: what we take, what we leave. The objects that we embrace, and the strangers that we distrust.
Anyway, that’s everything I know about Camus.
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