SAD 2

After self-diagnosing myself with a possible case of seasonal affective disorder, it's strangely serendipitous that I would pick up The Plague.

The townspeople in quarantine, joltingly separated from their loved ones by risk of contagion, calibrate their emotions according to the whims of the weather. Camus astutely observes that these townspeople, having formerly placed their loved ones at the foreground of their small, personal landscapes, now lacking focus or drive for feelings of happiness or despair in any tangible sense (that is, in a lover, a friend, or a family member), have come to rely on the weather as substitute source of emotion. Without one particularly potent, meaningful personal relationship to dictate the mercury levels on their emotional thermometers, the sun now represents happiness, cloudy days, despair. Where there was once imperviousness to the seasons, in its place is an unconscious vulnerability to sunshine and raindrops.