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Camus
Raised by an illiterate, impoverished mother, Albert Camus became one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and a symbol of the opposite to blind allegiance to Communist ideology. Less than three years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, at the age of forty-four, he died in an automobile accident.
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
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November 24, 2010
Interesting because I didn't know anything about Camus's life. The highlight for me, though, was the frequent quotation from his notebooks and works. Wow, so much to chew on. Here are my favourites.
"he feels sorry for his mother, is that the same as loving her?"
"one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgia for lost poverty. A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility."
[after a stay in a tb clinic] "They tried to see their future with hope. One of them had a fever of only 100 in the evening instead of 101. Another knew someone with third degree tuberculosis who was dead at 70. This was how they lived, fearing only their death, wanting to have the same death as everyone, a death that arrives in a far off future."
[lying about his poor background] "He knew shame and all at once the shame of having been ashamed."
"Yet even here, I know that I shall never come close enough to the world. I must be naked and dive into the sea ... and consummate with my flesh the embrace for which sun and sea, lips to lips, have so long been sighing."
"I want to keep my lucidity to the last, and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror."
"The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation."
"It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all. Six or eight hours a day so as not to die of starvation."
"In every life there are a great number of small emotions and a small number of great emotion."
"We all more or less wish for the death of those we love." (reminded me of Wilde's "each man kills the one he loves" from Ballad of Reading Gaol)
"People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels." (resonates because I am paying attention to prototypes and demos)
"a poor and naked man enamoured of a sun that leaves no shadows. Far from being bereft of all feeling, he is animated by a passion for the absolute and for truth."
"There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."
"the certainty of a crashing fate without the resignation that ought to accompany it"
He reimagined Sisyphus, saying that despite the impossible-to-succeed task, Sisyphus was conscious and therefore could keep his dignity. It was analogous to his attitude to Existentialism, that because life always ends in death doesn't mean we lose our humanity. "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"how can one feel tender in a town where nothing appeals to the mind, where even ugliness is anonymous, where the past is reduced to nothing." (one for anyone who's lived in a small town)
"My youth is fleeing from me: that is what being ill means."
"We must do everything at once or accomplish nothing at all". (re: post-war France rebuilding)
"every death sentence is an affront to morality"
(re: his work ethic) "it has taken me years of perseverance to escape from amusements"
"no man has ever dared describe himself as he is"
"Paris is a wondrous cave, and its inhabitants, seeing their own shadows reflected on the far wall, take them for the only reality there is." (equally applicable to SF, Wellington, NYC, ...)
"Once the slightest portion of the heart is subjected to duty, true love is impossible."
"People insist on confusing marriage and love on the one hand, and love and happiness on the other. But they have nothing in common. That is why, the absence of love being more frequent than love, there are happy marriages."
"The murder of a human being elicits your outrage, apparently, only to the extent that the victim shares your ideas."
(alone in his cabin on a ship to South America) "Either this stripped-down solitude or the storm of love--nothing else in the world interests me."
"I have never been able to succumb to what is called home life (so often the very opposite of an inner life): 'bourgeois' happiness bores and terrifies me."
"In the clamour we live in, love is impossible and justice not enough."
"According to our existentialists, every man is responsible for what he is. This explains the complete disappearance of compassion in their universe of aggressive old men."
"Holland, sweet Holland, where you learn the patience to die."
(quoting a friend's letter to him, re: the confession that Camus had seen a girl jump off a bridge to commit suicide and had done nothing to help) "each of us, without exception, has in his life a young girl that he did not help."
"we are condemned to live together" (his most famous quote, and rightly so)
(after a theatre run finished) "Happy fatigue. Life, marvellous life, its injustice, its glory, its passion, its fights, life begins again. Still have force to love everything and create everything."
"Capital punishment upsets the only indisputable human solidarity--our solidarity against death."
"At this moment, bombs are being thrown into the streetcars in Algeria. My mother might be in one of those streetcars. If that's justice, I prefer my mother."
"he feels sorry for his mother, is that the same as loving her?"
"one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgia for lost poverty. A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility."
[after a stay in a tb clinic] "They tried to see their future with hope. One of them had a fever of only 100 in the evening instead of 101. Another knew someone with third degree tuberculosis who was dead at 70. This was how they lived, fearing only their death, wanting to have the same death as everyone, a death that arrives in a far off future."
[lying about his poor background] "He knew shame and all at once the shame of having been ashamed."
"Yet even here, I know that I shall never come close enough to the world. I must be naked and dive into the sea ... and consummate with my flesh the embrace for which sun and sea, lips to lips, have so long been sighing."
"I want to keep my lucidity to the last, and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror."
"The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation."
"It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all. Six or eight hours a day so as not to die of starvation."
"In every life there are a great number of small emotions and a small number of great emotion."
"We all more or less wish for the death of those we love." (reminded me of Wilde's "each man kills the one he loves" from Ballad of Reading Gaol)
"People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels." (resonates because I am paying attention to prototypes and demos)
"a poor and naked man enamoured of a sun that leaves no shadows. Far from being bereft of all feeling, he is animated by a passion for the absolute and for truth."
"There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."
"the certainty of a crashing fate without the resignation that ought to accompany it"
He reimagined Sisyphus, saying that despite the impossible-to-succeed task, Sisyphus was conscious and therefore could keep his dignity. It was analogous to his attitude to Existentialism, that because life always ends in death doesn't mean we lose our humanity. "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"how can one feel tender in a town where nothing appeals to the mind, where even ugliness is anonymous, where the past is reduced to nothing." (one for anyone who's lived in a small town)
"My youth is fleeing from me: that is what being ill means."
"We must do everything at once or accomplish nothing at all". (re: post-war France rebuilding)
"every death sentence is an affront to morality"
(re: his work ethic) "it has taken me years of perseverance to escape from amusements"
"no man has ever dared describe himself as he is"
"Paris is a wondrous cave, and its inhabitants, seeing their own shadows reflected on the far wall, take them for the only reality there is." (equally applicable to SF, Wellington, NYC, ...)
"Once the slightest portion of the heart is subjected to duty, true love is impossible."
"People insist on confusing marriage and love on the one hand, and love and happiness on the other. But they have nothing in common. That is why, the absence of love being more frequent than love, there are happy marriages."
"The murder of a human being elicits your outrage, apparently, only to the extent that the victim shares your ideas."
(alone in his cabin on a ship to South America) "Either this stripped-down solitude or the storm of love--nothing else in the world interests me."
"I have never been able to succumb to what is called home life (so often the very opposite of an inner life): 'bourgeois' happiness bores and terrifies me."
"In the clamour we live in, love is impossible and justice not enough."
"According to our existentialists, every man is responsible for what he is. This explains the complete disappearance of compassion in their universe of aggressive old men."
"Holland, sweet Holland, where you learn the patience to die."
(quoting a friend's letter to him, re: the confession that Camus had seen a girl jump off a bridge to commit suicide and had done nothing to help) "each of us, without exception, has in his life a young girl that he did not help."
"we are condemned to live together" (his most famous quote, and rightly so)
(after a theatre run finished) "Happy fatigue. Life, marvellous life, its injustice, its glory, its passion, its fights, life begins again. Still have force to love everything and create everything."
"Capital punishment upsets the only indisputable human solidarity--our solidarity against death."
"At this moment, bombs are being thrown into the streetcars in Algeria. My mother might be in one of those streetcars. If that's justice, I prefer my mother."
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