From that point on, it could be said that the plague became the affair of us all. Up to then, despite the surprise and anxiety that these unusual events had brought us, everyone had gone on with his business, as well as he could, in the usual place. And that no doubt would continue. But, once the gates were closed, they all noticed that they were in the same boat, including the narrator himself, and that they had to adjust to the fact. This is how, for example, a quite individual feeling such as being separated from a loved one suddenly became, in the very first weeks, the feeling of a whole people and, together with fear, the greatest agony of that long period of exile.
Albert Camus, The Plague








