I read The Plague when I was a junior at Notre Dame, in 1978. I’d been given an assignment to write a paper about the book but had confused deadlines, and I realized at about 6 p.m. one evening that the paper was due at 9 a.m. the next morning – and I hadn’t read a page, had no idea what it was about.

I knew I was going to be up all night – way past the closing hours for the campus library – so I needed to find the quietest place in a reliably raucous dormitory for reading and then writing. Every dorm at Notre Dame had a chapel, and every chapel had a confessional. So, at the risk of committing sacrilege, I closeted myself away in one – on the penitent’s side, at least – and in that place, for many hours, had a transcendent experience.

I cherish everything about the book but particularly the passage of which this quote is a part. It moved me close to tears – it still does. When I emerged from that small room at sunrise I had a far better sense of what I wanted to do with my life than I’d had when I entered it. My journey to follow took detours at times, but I arrived at the right place: as a prosecutor, joining forces with victims against the pestilences of violence. And by the end of it all – again quoting Camus – I’d found that “there is more to admire in people than there is to despise.”