How much of an astrologer would have the idea to gloat about the “incredibly improbable journey we're on” that we all can, and often do, experience as absurd and confusing—so unmanageable and incomprehensible as to be absurd. What should we do, and what should we do with the stupidity of life that plagues us every day? Oliver Sacks believed that “the most we can do is write – intelligently, creatively, provocatively – about what it is like to live in the world at this time.” And yet to describe what it is like can make us despair. However, we must analyze.
More than a decade earlier Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) became the second youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded him for a work that “with the sincerity of seeing clearly sheds light on the problems of the human conscience in our time,” thought about the relationship between folly and redemption, Jeanine in an interview with his Delpe 19 Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library) – an excellent posthumous collection that gave us Camus on how to strengthen our morals in difficult times and happiness, despair, and love of life.
Three years before the interview, the twenty-eight-year-old Camus surprised the world with his revolutionary philosophical essay. The myth of Sisyphuswhich begins with one of the most powerful opening sentences in all of literature and explores the paradox of life's absurdities. “I take on three absurd consequences, which are my rebellion, my freedom, and my love,” he writes – something that makes the interlocutor question whether a philosophy uttered without reason can cause people to despair.
Camus—who once asserted years ago that “there is no love of life without despair of life”—answers:
All I can do is defend myself, I realize that what I am saying is related. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not be a dead end. It stirs up rebellion that may bear fruit. The analysis of the concept of rebellion can help us to find ideas that can restore the meaning related to existence, although the meaning may always be in danger.
Speaking at the end of the meaningless brutality of World War II, six years before he formed his ideas about solidarity and what it really means to be a rebel, Camus considers the only act of courage and rebellion to be done:
In a world of seemingly impenetrable stupidity, we must reach a greater level of understanding between people, greater integrity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be transparent (lies confuse things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they should feel some justice around them.
I've always wondered if Camus had read WH Auden's poem “September 1, 1939,” written in 1940, which includes this poignant passage that resonates with Camus:
All I have is a voice
Undoing the folded lies,
Love lies in the brain
Of a street man with passions
And lies in the Authority
Whose buildings touch the sky:
There is no such thing as a Kingdom
And no one exists alone;
Hunger does not allow you to choose
To the citizen or the police;
We must love each other or die.
Fill in this piece for Camus' endless leaks Lyrical and Critical Essays with Albert Einstein on our powerful counterforce against injustice and Naomi Shihab Nye on choosing kindness over fear, then revisit Camus' enduring views on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, the most important question of existence, the lacuna between truth and meaning, and the touching letter of gratitude he sent to his boyhood teacher shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize.
