Reading Camus in Our Time of Plague

Rapoport ponders how working through the COVID pandemic has changed her even though the words to explain it elude her and finds solace in the experience described in the Camus novel The Plague. She states that The Plague has a clean narrative arc; the devastation is profound, but it is circumscribed in time and space. COVID time, in contrast, moves fast and slow and a sense of whiplash is the norm. Finding a storyline amid the coronavirus pandemic only frustrates. Surges lurch forward and subside, recommendations shift, therapeutics come and go, new variants rise. Reading The Plague has been a ritual for me during a period pervaded by a deep disorientation. As cases again rise, she is taking stock of everything that has happened and considering the ways her identity as a physician over the past two and a half years has been altered in fundamental and unanticipated ways.