The inkling of a different reality. Let’s read Camus’ La Peste #2

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Knowing what is to come in the novel, Camus’ description of Oran in the opening pages of La Peste is brilliantly prescient.

Nobody is expecting their weekly routine of work and leisure to be interrupted. This, Camus notes, is what it means to be modern. The modern world has lost any sneaking suspicion of a reality beyond its own comfortable rhythms:

il est des villes et des pays où les gens ont, de temps en temps, le soupçon d’autre chose. En général, cela ne change pas leur vie. Seulement il y a eu le soupçon et c’est toujours cela de gagné. Oran, au contraire, est apparemment une ville sans soupçons, c’est-à-dire une ville tout à fait moderne (14)

there still exist towns and countries where people have now and then an inkling of something different. In general it doesn’t change their lives. Still, they have had an intimation, and that’s so much to the good. Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern.

Without “the inkling of something else” (le soupçon d’autre chose), an inkling of a transcendence, of another reality, any disruption of the “work-life balance”—or perhaps we ought to say the “work-life existence” or the “work-life reality”—strikes a blow not only to our daily rhythms but at our very sense of the real and of ourselves. This is reminiscent of Michel Serres’ argument that the city, the polis, has become our entire reality, and that “nature” has disappeared. We are utterly consumed with the reality we have made for ourselves, and leave no room for an “outside”.

Camus, however, hints ever so gently at what is to come when he slips in the casual adverb “apparently” (apparemment). Oran is “apparently” a city without a care in the world. How true, often, of the version of our lives we present for the consumption of others, or even the version of ourselves that we entertain in our own self-talk. We are “apparently” immune to the disruption of our familiar work-life reality, “apparently” content with our modern rhythms. Pandemics happen to those less sophisticated, less scientific, less modern than us. We are too busy for a pandemic, too busy working and living, apparently too busy to have an inkling of what is to come.