a picture of his childhood once he was an adult. He was an outgoing youth and athletic, which made it all the more devastating to him when he was nearly seventeen and had his first attack of tuberculosis. He considered this a weakness and never talked much about it. The disease came and went in a haphazard way, and it strengthened his awareness of death. Over the years, he would vacillate between illness and the euphoria that came over tuberculosis patients when the disease would withdraw (McCarthy 10-20).
Herbert R. Lottman notes some of the ways in which Camus incorporated his disease into his work, from a short story he wrote about his stay in the hospital ("L'H(pital du quartier pauvre") to the manuscript version of "Entre Oui et Non." The section on the disease in the latter work was too personal for Camus, and it was omitted from the final version of the work. Clearly, though, the disease had a major influence on the development of his thought, for it wa a disease that was always with him:
All his life Albert Camus would be handicapped by his tuberculosis. He would miss out on an otherwise certain professorship, he would be exempted from World War II military services. . . And he would be obliged to slow down, to cancel travel or other activity, because of a new attack and the long convalescence which necessarily followed. From now on, the bitterness he felt in those first months when he watched others kicking soccer balls and running in the sun would never be far below the surf; he had been as they were still. In his writings it would come through as irony (Lottman 46).
Of course, it would also emerge in a number of the philosophical themes that would interest Camus and in the subject matter of many of his works. Certainly, his experience with this disease would influence his writing of The Plague, and the new sense he had of his own mortality would have a major influence on the development of his philo...