In a quest for meaning, NPR compares the Ebola epidemic to Albert Camus’s The Plague.
The Plague doesn’t have a happy ending, of course, though it’s not quite as hopeless as you might think. Initially, Dr. Rieux is a little resigned to the disease that’s threatening his city: “One hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while,” Camus writes. “And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”
