Reading The Plague…during a plague

 

“There have been as many plagues as worst in history; yet always plagues and wars to take people equally by surprise”(Camus, 34). 

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 certainly did take the world by surprise. At a conference in February, we discussed the rising numbers in China and what the travel industry might do if the virus was to spread outside the region. Later that month in Ethiopia, we were counting our good fortune that the virus had not hit Africa yet. By the time I arrived stateside, Seattle was a hotbed to virus activity, two weeks later in March, the city of Portland shut down. 

I kept track of the changes as I observed them: the first time I worse a mask in public, the first time I saw public signage about mask wearing, the first time I bought something with plexiglass between me and the cashier. Everything suddenly felt sterile. Every time I went in public I felt like people treated me like a harbor of disease. 

The Plague by Albert Camus sold out on Amazon. 

That’s when I remembered I already owned a copy I had never read. 

By April Camus had back from the past to save me. His book, written 60 years ago, described what our world was going through so precisely. It was almost more accurate than watching the news. It was a warning, a prediction.

Reading The Plague by Camus was also healing and cathartic. It was so relevant and timely it almost felt like a friend speaking into my ear, telling me what has happened, and what is left to come. Even he said what so many others are echoing now: “Every day that passes we are one day closer to the end of this ordeal.”

My favorite quotes that seem to describe March 2020:

“But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life. Thus, for example, a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and - together with fear – the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead…  

“One of the most striking consequences of the closing of the gate was, in fact, this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared for it” (Camus, 61).

“The first thing that plague brought to our town was exile… It was undoubtably the feeling of exile – that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire… We returned to our prison-houses, we had nothing left to us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea - anyhow, as soon as could be – once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it” (Camus, 65).

From summer and Fall 2020:

“They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose” (Camus, 66). 

“They seemed at the mercy of the sky’s caprices – in other words, suffered and hoped irrationally” (Camus, 69).

“In the early days, when they thought this epidemic was much like other epidemics, religion held its ground. But once these people realized their instant peril, they gave their thoughts to pleasure. And all the hideous fears that stamp their faces in the daytime are transformed in the fiery, Dusty night fall into a sort of hectic exaltation, and unkempt freedom fevering their blood” (Camus, 111).

From January 2021, after Biden’s election and the vaccine being released:

“All agreed that the amenities of the past couldn’t be restored at once; destruction is an easier, speedier process then reconstruction… But in reality behind these mild aspirations lurks wild, extravagant hopes, and often one of us, becoming aware of this, would hastily add that, even on the rosiest view, you could expect the plague to stop from one day to another” (Camus, 241).  

“The fluctuated between high optimism and extreme depression” (Camus, 244).  

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen closets; that it bodes it’s time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city” (Camus, 278).  

Reading Tijuana through the voices of people who love it

After my first visit to Tijuana in October of 2017 I became obsessed with the city, and I wanted to find other people who shared my obsession. Surely I could not be the only person who realized how remarkable of a place this was? And I was not. Writers, poets, philosophers, and scholars have all been writing about Tijuana for decades.

This strange town and its history have not escaped the attention of artists and creatives.

So when I returned from my trip I went about trying to get my hands on every book ever written about Tijuana. My search took me through academic essays, exposes, novellas, short stories, and poetry. And I devoured it all.

Tijuana is unique. It does not have the broad appeal of a city like Paris, a place that has always drawn creatives of all types to both live in and write about the city simultaneously. Tijuana is also unlike Tangier, a city that attracted many creative people during a certain era, but is seldom written about or characterized in literature.

The people interested in Tijuana - interested enough to write about it - all share one trait: a feeling of not belonging anywhere. They are a border town within themselves, navigating multiple cultures and identities. I got this sense from all of them, whether  Mexican nationals, Americans, or Europeans. Whether they were scholars or poets. 

Here is some of the best of the writing about Tijuana:

"There are many Tijuanas. Each one of them is half myth, half temporarily out of service."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming

“I think maybe if I walk the streets where someone was afraid, where an entire city was afraid, I’ll maybe understand the fear a little better. This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy. We take it like a shot of tequila, or a bump of coke from the key to a stranger’s home. We want the inebriation of presence to dissolve the fact of difference.”

-       VICE 2013 

“Tijuana blurs. Once I leave, I’m eager to talk about it – the way you’re eager to talk about a dream when you wake up, afraid it will dissolve if you don’t pin the details to their places, sketch a path between absurdities.”

-      - VICE 2013

"In my lifetime, I have not felt a love as profound as the confusing passion that I feel for Tijuana, an obsession that does not preclude criticism and which more accurately provokes sudden repudiation. Tijuana elicits a crazy love, a narcotic love. Tijuana is addictive."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming

“Sometimes the city fucks on the first date, and sometimes it doesn’t. But always, always, we wake up in the morning and find we didn’t know it at all.”

 -       VICE 2013

"We come to Tijuana from everywhere, the difference is that some of us came first and others later."

- Martin de la Rosa, Tijuana Dreaming

 

"For the deceased poet Eduardo Arellano, Tijuana rather than “a no-place is the place of saturation. As such, it accepts and continually incorporates foreign elements, because, in fact, it would seem that nothing is foreign to the city. And a particular ambiguity arises within this incredible abundance of humanity that gives places like this city a feeling of perversity. The ambiguity makes these places exceptionally favorable to diverse expression of the human, ranging from happiness to art."

- Tijuana Dreaming, 27

 

"Tijuana and San Diego are not in the same historical time zone. Tijuana is poised at the beginning of the industrial age, a Dickensian city with palm trees. San Diego is a postindustrial city of high impact plastic and desperate dieting."

- Richard Rodriguez, Tijuana Dreaming  47

"To live here is to return to the greatest myth of all myths, to be required to profess - before certain visitors, certain neighbors, certain experts - a second rate esotericism…"

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming,  49

"Write something about the city and you will soon be addicted to her self-deception."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming,  49

"To live on the Border is to reside in the middle of an unexpected theology. An embezzled ontology. The suspicion that all this will soon be either less or more than a city, the laboratory of what is to come."

- Tijuana Dreaming, 50

"Tijuana is a combination of extreme situations. Perhaps it is the most reliable proof that we could survive the apocalypse." 

- Tijuana Dreaming, 51

"Coming to Tijuana on an intellectual tour assumes the old concept that walking in the streets can provide us with a special gnosis. In this sense, visiting Tijuana to write about Tijuana is a nostalgia that makes sense." 

- Tijuana Dreaming, 59

“Tijuana has more to do with science fiction now than with Mexican history books.” - 

- Torolab , Tijuana Dreaming62

“Tijuana has the look of a set design, an ephemeral set-up, a location where endless movies and simulacra will be shot, but where nothing will actually happen.” 

- Guillermo Fadanelli, Tijuana Dreaming 62

"Tijuana is like a mirage, only there for the person who desires to see her and is able to visit her. For the majority of people, though, she is transparent, she doesn’t exist." 

- Tijuana Dreaming, 63

"Writing about a place “reveals as much about ourselves as it does about the worlds represented.” 

- Tijuana Dreaming. 118

"Tijuana as an outpost posits a cardinal rule for the Middle World: “you can only survive and move forward by continuing to invent yourself.” 

- Breytenbach, Tijuana Dreaming122

"Shameless exhibition has turned this area into a hotel with no doors where nothing is off limits." 

-  Tijuana Dreaming, 216

"Promiscuity is seductive - the cosmopolitan boredom, the lack of etiquette, a studied disinterest in anyone else’s life, the scant violence despite the sinister surroundings." 

-  Tijuana Dreaming  216

 “Border is form, and as a consequence, also art.” 

- Claudio Magris,  Tijuana Dreaming 216

"In terms of ideology, Tijuana is a nightmare.

To live here is to be a character, because at the border

There are no inhabitants, only archetypes. The border doesn’t have

Life: it has metaphysics - listen to its thing."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming 219

"I love TJ, for thousands of reasons….for being creative in spite of its precariousness and for pushing on in spite of tremendous neglect…for its bar-hopping nights and its obvious social contradictions, for its incredible audacity and its obvious ingenuity dealing with everything foreign."

- Tijuana Dreaming, 307

"Why have so many people said so much about Tijuana? I think it is because Tijuana has become a symbol representing fears and subconscious desires."

- Tijuana Dreaming 57

Lisbon through the written word

Because I had never been to Lisbon, I decided to learn about it through the city's most famous writers. I had about five or six booked checked out at the library, all famous novels that took place in Lisbon and written by Portuguese authors, but only two of them really left an impression on me, enough to share a few quotes from each.

The First is The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s most famous writer.

Indeed everywhere I went there were cafés named after him, figurines of him for sale in gift shops, and even a monument where he was buried at the Jerónimos Monastery. I could think of no equivalent American writers who were so venerated in society.

The Book of Disquiet is one of his only works translated into English, and it reads more like excerpts from his diary. He makes frequent reference to the Rua dos Douradores in Lisbon, where he lived in a small room overlooking the street. There were a few passages I found from his book that really captured the essence of the city.

Installed on the upper floors of certain respectable taverns in Lisbon can be found a small number of restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station. Amongst the clientele of such places, which are rarely busy except on Sundays, one is as likely to encounter the eccentric as the nondescript, to find people who are but a series of parentheses in the book of life (Pessoa, 1).

In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible (Pessoa, 1).

In these lingering summer evenings, I love the quiet of this the commercial part of town, all the more because it’s such a contrast with the noisy bustle that fills it during the day. Rua do Arsenal, Rua da Alfândega, the sad roads that reach out to the east where the Alfândega ends, and the long, solitary line of quiet quays: they comfort me with sadness on those evenings when I choose to share their solitude (Pessoa, 22).

Praça da Figueira, replete with goods of various colours, fills with customers and peoples my horizon with vendors of all kinds (Pessoa, 28).

As the mask of veils fell away, the features of the city were reborn. The day, which had already dawned, dawned anew, as if a window had been suddenly flung open. The noises in the streets took on a slightly different quality, as if they too had only just appeared. A blueness insinuated itself even into the cobblestones and the impersonal auras of passers-by (Pessoa, 32).

Know that I have only to raise my eyes to see before me the sordid skyline of the houses, the unwashed windows of all the offices in the Baixa and the empty windows of the top floor apartments and, above them, around the garret roofs, the inevitable washing hung out to dry in the sun amongst flowerpots and plants (Pessoa, 94).

The second book that really impacted me, perhaps even more than Book of Disquiet, was the Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by Jose Saramago. Ricard Reis is another famous Portuguese writer, and the fictional  story follows him from Brazil back to Lisbon after the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa.

Here the sea ends and the earth begins. It is raining over the colorless city  (Saramago, 1).

Several bars were open, side by side, murky, their viscous lights encircled by shadows, the silent image of a dirty wineglass on a zinc counter. These façades are the great wall that screens the city, and the taxi skirts them without haste, as if searching for some break or opening, a Judas gate, or the entrance to a labyrinth (Saramago, 7).

When one awaits sleep in the silence of a room that is still unfamiliar, listening to the rain outside, things assume their real dimension, they all become great, solemn, heavy. What is deceptive is the light of day, transforming life into a shadow that is barely perceptible. Night alone is lucid, sleep, however, overcomes it, perhaps for our tranquillity and repose, the peace of our souls (Saramago, 23).