The Plague Is Upon Us

I recently finished reading The Plague by Albert Camus. It's about a town of 200,000 named Oran who experiences a relentless plague and because of this is shut off from the rest of the world for nine months as its citizens die by the hundreds every day. Camus delves into the psyches of certain residents, and the population in general, as they struggle to deal with death and an atmosphere in which death can suddenly come to any citizen, regardless of age or wealth, at any time. He goes to expand this very concrete plague into a more vague metaphor of the death inside all of us, of a more general plague we all suffer from one day:

"At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she--or he--would die, without ever, their whole lives long, gone father than this by way of making their affections known. Thus, too, he had lived at Tarrou's side, and Tarrou had died this evening without their friendship's having had time to enter fully into the life of either. Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known the plague and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match."