Albert Camus tagged posts

She is sitting on a bus crossing the wintry Algerian desert, seated tight up against her slumbering merchant husband and surrounded by Arabs tucked deep into their burnooses to ward off the cold and the fine grains of sand that find their way through cracks in the vehicle. Suddenly, she notices a French soldier across the aisle who gives her a glance, carrying just a tinge of suggestion.

That glance and a couple of other feeling states to follow are about as far as the “adultery” in this story’s title ever goes, but it sets in motion a long and impassioned emotional storm inside our protagonist, with the reverberations extending far beyond this story and her life.

What transpires from there in Albert Camus’s 1957 short story, The Adulterous Woman, speaks in profound and enduring ways to the human condition...

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

Wam!

With that unambiguous, declarative broadside right between the eyes and ears of his readers, Albert Camus opens his brief, haunting and still relevant The Myth of Sisyphus, a 1955 essay that explored the implications of his opening line for modern humanity.

It’s a bracing statement, as if from Moses on the mountain, a bold proclamation designed to grab readers’ attention with its sense of no-B.S. certitude.

I remember how deep I sounded to myself when I parroted the line to anyone who would listen when I first came across it some 40 years ago.

“Whoa, so that’s it? If I want to be serious about my life, I have to consider whether the best and most logical and philosophically consistent thing to do is just go ahead and kill myself? Well, I was thinking of going to graduate school or the Peace Corps or trying to get a se...

Reading is a most curious and fantastic act. The recognition of ink blots set in a certain pattern on a page, the training to decode those blots (often beginning barely out of infancy, before the basic biological function of controlled toileting is even mastered!).

The oft-times visceral response to those blots as we piece them together, run them through our interpretive sieve, and then find ourselves engaged, body and soul, with the stories they tell.

This ability of the written word to transport us out of time, into another world, another circumstance, another set of characters for whom we come to have a deep regard—if not love—this is an astonishing and even miraculous thing, is it not? It makes me want to sing to the heavens in praise of our brains. (And sometimes wail in despair at their misbegotten use…)

Recently I was reading a magazine article on the novelist Philip Roth and his relationships...