A two-for-one special going on my “want to read” list from one of my all time favorite authors.
“The Plague”
and
“The Myth of Sisyphus”
by Albert Camus
When I read “The Stranger” in high school (I covered some of this in an earlier post about that particular book) I fell in love with Camus and his writing style. There’s something familiar and comforting about it. Maybe that’s weird but that’s what I love about literature, there’s something for everyone and not everyone does it the same.
I’m excited to get into these at some point but for now they collect dust and sit on my bookshelf.
Albert Camus, The Wrong Side and the Right Side, 1937 (L’Envers et l’Endroit): Preface; from Personal Writings (translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy and Justin O’Brien)
Your letter at last! How weightless, how light the air is, how I breathe better! Just think: nothing since Friday, nothing since that sad letter… But it’s all over, the sun that floods into my room is leaping up and down all over the place. I love you and I’ll wait, yes I’ll wait for everything to find you at last, alive, happy, desiring… Yesterday I completed my program. That is to say, I wrote sixteen letters. There are still as many left. But I’ve worked out a little form that I’ll send to all the unwelcome and even to the others. It’s like, “Mr. AC, who is ill, apologizes for not being able to… etc.” With this I’ll liquidate everything and I’ll be able to think about my work at leisure.
I’m so ashamed that I’ve done almost nothing in two weeks! On the other hand, my appetite has returned. I look good and I seem to have put on weight. I sleep much better. From time to time an insomnia of two or three hours, but more rare. I am afraid of them, because then the imagination works too much. Last night I went through your whole life, I mean everything I know about it. Then I wait for the morning and the sun that puts the shadows on the run. Last night Kim’s master came to pick him up. He had dinner here and I said goodbye to the beast.
I don’t care if you sum up your days. But do this for me: be clear. Never put: “At 4 o'clock, an appointment.” Say with whom. I know it’s stupid, but it helps me. You understand me, by the way. You did well to advise Serge in the sense that you’re telling me. There’s no reason to deceive the audience. This Chinese system goes well with the Elite Theater! My dear love, my black, my beautiful, my lukewarm, what a desire I have for your presence, your warmth. I think of the little room suspended above Paris, of the falling evening, of the glow of the radiator and of us, linked to each other, in the penumbra… I also dream that I am walking through Paris with you, and that we are listing restaurants…
Darling, there was also sweetness, laughter, sweet complicity, infinite tenderness between us. And this is what I also regret, at my hours, as at others I regret the storm of desire, or the perfect hour near the lake, in the sky of Ermenonville. It is you as a whole that I regret. And if I desire so much to have the strength to sink into my work it is to be able to arrive at spring, free in heart and mind, and melt totally into you. Write every day, if you can. Give me the dates of your shows. And send me your love, Maria darling, I use it every hour. How I kiss you! Until it wears off, precisely, my beautiful face…
Monday 10 p.m. [January 16, 1950]
After writing to you this afternoon, we went for a little walk in a group. The light was beautiful, but I was bored. I love this country in solitude. It was getting cold under the sun. I went home and started working. I redid my preface and wrote about half of it. I thought of you, I was warm at heart. Dinner and then a moment by the fire. No one was talking, so I came alive, I said stupid things, I laughed. Those lonely excesses leave you sad afterwards.
I went back to my room, got into bed, and there you are. The wind picked up outside and blew around the house. But the room is warm. I can imagine you. I love you. I’m caressing you. Close to you, even closer… I love the night, with you, the enclosed spaces, the secluded countryside, the ends of the world, but with you. So I wait, with patience or with rage, I wait for those moments when the world is depopulated, when everything is silent, when there is only us and those black horses, you know. My darling love, wait, my love, come back soon. And until then be strong and patient, armed with all my faithful love. I kiss you endlessly.”
Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, January 16, 1950 [#130]
Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.
We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.
Albert Camus
“The Century of Fear,” which is the first essay in Neither Victims Nor Executioners, published Nov 19, 1946
He had turned back toward the window and tightened his hand over the nape of Lucienne’s neck. She said nothing. Then, without looking at him, “At least you feel friendly toward me, don’t you?” Patrice knelt beside her and gently bit her shoulder. “Friendly, yes, the way I feel friendly toward the night. You are the pleasure of my eyes, and you don’t know what a place such joy can have in my heart.”
hate how this guy in this book im reading criticizes camus’ lack of pessimism and insists on how actually the character of meursault is closer to us than the myth of sisyphus because the physicality of life is a greater comfort than the act of rebellion like
1) why are you calling out camus’ lack of pessimism when he says that on his philosophy shines a “neverfading sun” and that he doesn’t think his philosophy can described as pessimist in the first place. like why are you criticizing a point HE DOES NOT MAKE
2) the meaning of the myth of sisyphus doesn’t have end in self-awareness and smug satisfaction for your own rebellion otherwise that’s not rebellion in itself. if you think about a rebellion born out of pride that has still a positive impact on the world around you though perhaps intrinsically meaningless as meaningless is life itself then. then how can you compare the two when one of them is a creative, continuous effort and the other is just passivity lmao
“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”
What is existentialism? For Simone de Beauvoir (b. 1908) the discipline is a response to the human need to find a ‘place in a world turned upside down’. It cannot be explained succinctly. Still, let’s have a go.
Pyrrhus and Cineas
In her 1944 essay Pyrrhus and Cineas Beauvoir looks to explain humanity’s quest to find meaning by way of analogy.
Pyrrhus has a plan:
‘We are going to subjugate Greece first,’ says Pyrrhus.
‘And after that?’ asked Cineas.
We will vanquish Africa.’
‘After Africa?’
‘We will go onto Asia … ’
‘And after that?’
‘We will go on as far as India.’
‘After India?’
‘Ah! I will rest.’
‘Why not rest right away?’
According to Beauvoir, Cineas’ question haunts our projects. For why do anything? What’s the point? We’re only going to end up where we started.
However, it’s only Pyrrhus who leads an authentic life. Whereas many people fail even to question their lives, he directs himself towards goals, having the imagination to forge something for himself from the world.
Pyrrhus doesn’t leave to return home, where he started: he leaves to conquer; then to conquer again … Each time he decides a new end. Each time he ‘transcends’ his situation.
‘The paradox of the human condition is that every end can be surpassed, and yet, the project defines the end as an end.’
The garden
The values we draw from our projects are never intrinsic, ready-made, or universal. To believe they are is to possess bad faith.
‘By identifying himself with his sex, his country, his class, with the whole of humanity [or God], a man can increase his garden, but he increases it only in words … [T]he fly on the stagecoach claims he is the one who led the carriage to the top of the hill.’
We give the world meaning through our engagement with it, an act which is accomplished with freedom and subjectivity. We throw ourselves towards ends with uncertainty: the price of leaving the world of ennui and inertia behind us. But, by choosing the locations and the limits of our projects, we snatch ‘the world from the darkness of absurdity’.
This garden must belong to me; I cultivate it. It even transcends me when I die.
‘I am enclosed within it until death because that garden becomes mine from the moment I cultivate it.’
It matters that our values are not given to us. My garden cannot be merged with the sterile void of the Universe, a passive equilibrium.
Being is not fixed to things: being is fixed to itself in a mode of transcendence. Like Pyrrhus’ journey, projects don’t end: ends are surpassed by other ends. Conquer or rest: it doesn’t matter which you choose. Just choose!
⁂
‘Is that my business? What does India matter? And what does Epirus matter? Why call this soil, this woman, these children mine? I brought these children into the world; they are here. The woman is next to me; the soil is under my feet. No tie exists between them and me. Mr Camus’s Stranger thinks like this; he feels foreign to the whole world, which is completely foreign to him … The inert existence of things is separation and solitude.’
“If you knew all the love, the joy, the strong hope that you put in me, the absolute devotion that I feel, you would rest in peace in the depths of your heart. No matter how hard it is, no matter how difficult it is, it seems to me that real life is beginning.”
— Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, September 9, 1949 [#88]
![Albert Camus & María Casares[x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/15525267f3577bfc1031abec43b5c62f/tumblr_okmgkmVsmv1relxa7o1_640.jpg "Albert Camus & María Casares[x]")
