Reading on in Camus’ The Plague, one has opportunity to reflect more and more upon the portrayal not only of the plague and its effects on Oran, but also upon the humans.

I spoke last time about the way in which Camus treats the quarantine as a form of exile. Exile in which we are at home. And that exile changes hue over time. We are, here, perhaps in the third week of quarantine? What will it feel like after two months, four, six? Longer? Camus writes of how the plague, ‘would seem to them like the very shape of their lives and when they would forget the existence that they had led in the days before’.

One of the other things Camus speaks about, is the way that the plague is an abstraction. It lacks concreteness. It cannot truly be ‘fought’, it doesn’t submit to reason. It doesn’t yield to love. It just is. Not that this causes, or should, call for a resignation. In the end, it is just another sickness. It robs us of futures, of hope, of life. But it is a madness or a cowardice to simply resign to it. This, perhaps, plays into to Camus’ heroic-anti-heroism, e.g. in the character of Dr. Rieux, who does nothing but his job, conceives of doing so as nothing but simple what one does, and yet understands that his ongoing fight is a series of temporary victories, in fact an ‘endless defeat’ (in conversation with Tarrou). Camus and I differ, of course, at a profound level on theological convictions. And yet, there is much I appreciate here. All the victories of hope and life in this world are temporary in the face of death. There is, for me, only one victor over death.

How does one fight plague? Here, perhaps, there is both a parallel and disjunction between Camus’ Oran, and our world. We are living in a global pandemic which exists in a globalised world that has more communication (in the sense of ‘traffic’) between place and persons than ever before. The level, breadth and speed, of international exchange is unparalleled in history. At the same time, we understand covid-19 far better than anybody understood most epidemics throughout history. We have a fairly clear grasp on how it’s transmitted. Even the plague of Camus’ Oran is functionally mysterious to most people. So our public health measures are logical. Abstract, but logical. Social distancing, globally, on this scale, has never been practiced before.

And yet, even as we’re socially distancing, the level of communication we are capable of, via electronic means, is also unprecedented. Camus writes convincingly of the way in which, at first, people forget the ones they miss and love. At first they are shadows, but ‘they realized later that these shadows could become still more fleshless, losing even the details of colour that memory kept there’. We lose both memory, and hope. For most of us, we are connected, via text, audio, video chat. It is possible to sustain those relationships.

I want to propose, though, that our experience is a different form of ‘cut-off’. And that is because we are still very much incarnate beings. We have and are bodies. And while mediated communication is a good, it is also a mediated good. We communicate through glass and wire. Our exile has become the ache of staring and talking through a pane, hands pressed against the glass, never touching. Perhaps this will make the ache greater, not less.

Pandemic is endlessly boring. It’s not heroic. And it’s not defeated by heroism. Perhaps you’ve seen the quip on social media, that treating front line health workers as ‘heroes’ lionises them as ‘self-sacrificial martyrs who are choosing to risk their lives for the rest of us’ while obviating the need to pay them decent salaries and provide them with decent conditions. How correct. Ask them, and they don’t identify as heroes. They’re just doing what any human would do in their shoes. Which is the only thing to be done. And the only thing to be done for the rest of us is… follow protocols, stay at home, do the mundane, go on living, and refuse to surrender to despair. This is how we minimise how many die. Without a resurrection hope, that is our endless temporary victory, our series of repeated defeats. For myself, there is a hope beyond death. For Camus, there is a hope despite death. An unheroic heroism.

There’s an excellent Latin<>Latin dictionary available online, Forcellini. But there isn’t a good Ancient Greek one.

There is Emiliano Caruso’s Monolingual Dictionary of Ancient Greek, which is hard to get, and expensive, but good from all I hear. But also entirely physical.

So, there’s a gap here, isn’t there. It would be useful, incredibly useful, to be able to provide Greek definitions of Greek terms, especially for learners wanting to use more L2 and less L1.

I’ve done some work on this piecemeal before, but now I’m tackling it a bit more systematically, to fit in with both data work with James Tauber, but also teaching with Athenaze. So I’m working through the Italian Athenaze, trying to generate slides for vocabulary items, that include (a) pictures, (b) a Latin gloss, (c) English gloss, and (d) Greek definition.

But how does one write a Greek definition?

Here’s some of my tricks:

(1) Getting a good sense of the word, using GE (Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek), LSJ.

(2) Looking at a number of comparable English terms in the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary. And seeing how they compose simple definitions.

(3) Making use of Latin>English and English>Greek lexica to get a sense of other Greek words I’ll need to write a definition.

(4) Checking on the usage of those other Greek words, to make sure I’m not misusing those in the definition.

(5) Writing the definition.

Here’s a very brief sample of the kind of stuff I’m working on, just on the definition side of thing:

I try to, in general, avoid just plugging things for the sake of plugging them, but I want to take the chance to promote the works of two acquaintances of mine who are doing some great audio-recording work, and really encourage you to consider supporting them if it would help you in your own Greek studies.

Firstly is David Ring, aka Magister Circulus

He has been doing some great video work on his youtube channel, including some excellent videos of my own LGPSI (I made a short playlist of the first four that he has done so far). Over on his patreon account, he has posted a lot of great audio CI material, including starting work on Athenaze material – read-throughs of each chapter, including with circling, paraphrasing, vocabulary pre-teaching, question and answer exercises. There’s only a couple of chapters up so far (2, 3, 17), but no doubt there will be more.

Secondly, the ἄοκνος Luke Ranieri

Apart from recording lots of Latin material, has also been doing some Greek. This includes some Koine pronounciation recordings of LGPSI, as well as Koine recordings of Athenaze, as well as Attic videos of Athenaze on his youtube channel.

As someone who has done some Greek recording, and is also trying to produce various materials, I know that it’s hard work, the feedback and reward is low, and time required is considerable. But these are two great sources of audio materials, to which I’d both direct you, and suggest considering supporting them if you can.

I’ve been re-reading Albert Camus’ The Plague and I wanted to share some thoughts.

Camus begins by establishing the very ordinariness of Oran. Indeed, the mundanity and blandness of its existence is brought to the forefront. And it takes a bit of a slow build before the plague itself breaks out on the novel. But when it does, it comes quite rapidly in the end. How accurate to our own times, perhaps to most times, the slow accumulation of evidence, the reluctance to call it a plague by authorities, given all that that name invokes, and the general malaise of attitude.

What has most struck me, upon re-reading, is the way Camus captures the very moments that the ‘shutdown’ takes effect.

There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars , yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared

However much we foresaw covid-19 coming upon us, and some saw further than others, collectively it came as a shock. Even a week before we started laying down severe public health measures, it was possible to think of it as something distant. And in fact, we go on trying to think of it as ‘distant’, even when it is very present. A plague, or a pandemic if you prefer, it hard to fathom, and so we fail to fathom it.

A pestilence does not have human dimensions , so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end…

It’s also very interesting the way Camus portrays the feeling of being in quarantine. He describes it as a kind of exile, or being in prison. And I think this is accurate. Exile as the exclusion from the places where we once where, places us in a new ‘place’, away from the past. Exile too, stretches out before us, while at the same time cutting off the future. Exile is an interminable state, in which one does not, cannot know, whether return is possible. He writes:

In short, from then on, we accepted our status as prisoners; we were reduced to our past alone and even if a few people were tempted to live in the future, they quickly gave it up, as far as possible, suffering the wounds that the imagination eventually inflicts on those who trust in it….

People give up trying to think or imagine when it will end, because once you have that fixed idea, “oh, it will last 3 months”, and then begin to realise that there’s no reason to suppose that it will, indeed it could last 9, 12, 18, 24, 48 months, or in fact change human society indefinitely, your original fixed-time hope is shattered, and the resolve it gave you washes away like sand castles in the tide.

Thus they endured that profound misery of all prisoners and all exiles, which is to live with a memory that is of no use to them. Even the past, which they thought of endlessly, had only the taste of remorse and longing

We must adapt to live in such times. In exile,

But, though this was exile, in most cases it was exile at home.