Tarrou was swinging his leg, tapping he terrace lightly with his heel, as he concluded. After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace. “Yes,” he replied. “The path of sympathy.” Albert Camus, The Plague, 225
The best part of Camus’s novel is the theme of commitment. In a time when there is plague (HIV/AIDS, empire, military occupation, to name three contemporary plagues people suffer from), what options do people exercise? Tarrou, Rieux, Grand, and eventually Rambert all take in one way or another “the path of sympathy,” the way of “comprehension,” which is Tarrou’s word for his code of morals.
Tarrou, who wanted to be a saint without God, is a hero, even with all his contradictions (and don’t we all have our own?): he looks unflinchingly at the plague and works to combat it, and risks his life. Ultimately, he dies. He is like Rachel Corrie: This must stop – but he couldn’t stop the plague, he could only accompany the victims. And not be condemning or judgmental.
And what is true religiosity in a time of plague? It is praxis, it is the path of sympathy, and you can take the dogmas, doctrines, and rituals—who needs them? It is Yitz Greenberg’s anguished cri de coeur: No theology talk is credible; pull the children out of the burning pits!
This means knowing that children are being burned alive (recall Steiner’s refusal to sit still). This means going near to where the children are, you’ve got to see it. And then doing something. But we keep our distance; we offer solidarity from afar, which alas isn’t much. Or is it? I myself said that “the real work” on behalf of Palestine was back in the US, what were we really doing to fight the plague there, in Gaza? It may have seemed heroic and risky from the stateside perspective. But I was convinced that we have more to contribute here, working to cut off the source of the funding and ideological support for the occupation, than doing accompaniment work. But it’s ambos: Both/and: I had that opportunity then, I have this opportunity now, to be vigilant. Here’s Rieux’s critique of distance: “…sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep-bound town, the doctor turned on his wireless before going to bed for the few hours’ sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering which he cannot see. ‘Oran! Oran!’ In vain the call rang over oceans, in vain Rieux listened hopefully; always the tide of eloquence began to flow, bringing home still more the unbridgeable gulf that lay between Grand and the speaker. ‘Oran, we’re with you!’ they called emotionally. But not, the doctor told himself, to love or to die together—and that’s the only way. They’re too remote.” [124]
Everyone who has gone to Palestine has said: You’ve got to see it! Rachel Corrie in an email said nothing back home can prepare you for what you will see there. But now we are here, in the land of brainwashing and shopping malls and the road of excess may simply lead to the palace of egoism. We are well-meaning, but unless we keep that fire burning, we get accommodated. We talk about the path of sympathy. But how hard it is to live it, here.
The three SLU students who spoke about craving to return to El Salvador on Tuesday; I could relate, somewhat. But that’s the easier path, to go there and feel embraced by the humane Salvadorans and feel a distance from all the uncomfortability of the US, a kind of denial of one’s own responsibility for our institutions. OK, they are young, what else are they gonna do—they want to walk with the people! They are fired up about the path of sympathy.
Ambos, ambos, ambos: Don’t get caught into either-or thinking: It’s both accompaniment and bearing witness and then it’s doing all the work that Chomsky wrote about at the end of Turning the Tide: “There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change—and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.”
It’s what I said in my “Why Go to Palestine” letter to Marc Ellis: Because I want to resist empire with mindfulness. What is mindfulness in Camus’s novel? They are French settlers, pied-noirs, they are not Buddhists! But I couldn’t help but think Nhat Hanh would be one with them in their efforts. Here’s Tarrou’s elaboration of his path of sympathy, his preferential option for the victims (and his refusal to kill): “ I know positively …that each of us has the plague within him; no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous willpower, never-ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death. Pending that release, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to “make history.” I know, too, that I’m not qualified to pass judgment on those others. There’s something lacking in my mental make-up, and it prevents me from being a rational murderer. So it’s a deficiency, not a superiority. But, as things are, I’m willing to be as I am; I’ve learnt modesty. All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true. You see, I’d hear such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s head enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak—and to act—quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track. That’s why I say there are pestilences and there are victims; no more than that. If, by making that statement, I, too, become a carrier of the plague-germ, at least I don’t do it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I’ve no great ambitions.” [224-225]
Tarrou is the Camus who spoke similarly to the Dominicans in 1948, saying the Church needed to speak up clearly and to pay up personally. OK, we are going to move in this direction with a likely sit-in at Senator Talent’s office in late May. Our task is to have as few lapses as possible, and so to be clear to Talent, to hecklers, to nay-sayers, to the bored, to the irate. Fine, you want to come at us, like Leonard said in Eyes on the Prize: “We’re gonna take what’s coming to us.” And also with Palestine: After hearing Mazen Badra speak so powerfully and vulnerably today, I think that he is a valuable witness for the churches, as the refuseniks are for the synagogues. Part of our work, the vigilance, is to get these people space top do their work of testifying.
And so Rieux does not take refuge in the consolation of religion, of faith that God and Jesus will harmonize it all in the end. He—and Tarrou—are healthier versions of Ivan Karamazov. They are not mad, possessed; they are lucid, modest, compassionate. They would rather be with the losers, the victims—like I said, I’d rather be with the losers awhile in Palestine—and they are willing to risk their lives. They are the “true healers,” reminding me of what Roy Bourgeois said: We are called to be healers, to relieve the suffering of others in a world filled with violence.
April 7, 2005
