Towards the beginning of the novel, when the plague first becomes prevalent in affecting the people, I noticed a relationship to what I had been learning in my psychology of time class. In this psych class we learned about temporal perspective, and how there are five different time directions: past negative, past positive, present hedonistic, present fatalistic, and future. Those people with a present hedonistic orientation tend to view life as living in the here and now and fail to think about the future, while present fatalistic people have a helpless and hopeless attitude toward life and the future. I found that when the people initially began dealing with the plague, temporal perspective played an important role.

While we have moved away from the topic of whether or not we as individuals are able to control our own happiness and our own emotions, I wanted to bring it back for a brief movement since I recently had a relevant experience. A couple of days ago I had discussed with my parents that I wanted to participate in buzzing for change once again. They were, and continue to be, in strong opposition. Last year I had chopped it off, and even that was not suitable to them. This year I plan to buzz for the cause, which I should have known would not be an idea greeted with open arms. They were upset that I did not seem to be backing down from my stance.

In my section on Thursday we discussed whether we felt the characters in The Plague were more cartoon-ish than those in Generosity, or the reverse. Most of the class listed the characters in Generosity higher on this scale. I found myself doing the same thing, but now I wonder whether I really did get more of a glimpse into the emotions and reality of the characters in The Plague than in Generosity. I have come to the conclusion that I felt the reality of Camus' characters more-so because of his creation of the ordinary. The language he uses is such that even the most ghastly things can be happening in this town, and yet the characters continue on about their business in this strange, almost cold way.

I came across this video of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. They collected various stones and tested out their resonances and eventually assembled a marimba. The video shows them making up a song on it. I just saw this and was thinking about our class with Tian. It sounds like music as most of us would define it, but it is interesting that they just found these stones and were able to produce pleasing sounds from them. I suppose we learned from Cage's piece that anything is music, so even if they were just throwing rocks on the ground it would be "music", but I still think their nature marimba is impressive.

 In my last post about The Plague I commented on the lack of emotion and personal distancing that I was feeling from the narration and in relation to the main characters. On page 192 I noticed the first shift towards more emotions- the death of a child, friends, and the toll that was taken by the doctors in particular. As more personal and close friendships were tried and lost, I saw the marked difference and began to connect and empathize with the characters more deeply. And, as often happens in novels, the end of the book presented an explanation for what I felt to be dispassion. With Rieux as the narrator I now feel that this distancing was necessary for the audience (the readers) to ultimately trust his account of all the happenings throughout the plague outbreak.

At the end of our discussion on Thursday, our group briefly talked about the word “evil”. Several people said that they avoided using the word because it had religious connotations, and others said that they used it to describe instances when people acted without humanity. Someone (I believe OrganizedKhaos?) gave the example of a cannibalistic murderer as someone she would term evil. I think that in general, though, evil is a subjective term (the ick-factor of the cannibalism aside, which I think it's safe to say is unappealing to most people).