Albert Camus -- forever modern

[bemildred]

Albert Camus, who would be 100 years old Thursday, is ageless. The French Algerian's life and work reflect the long tragedy of the 20th century, marked by disquiet, genocide and violence, but his diagnosis of our absurd condition, and his effort to find not a cure (there is none) but the proper response, tie him just as firmly to the new millennium.

Camus lived on intimate terms with the absurd. He lost his father, whom he never knew, in the war to end all wars that emphatically failed in that regard. He was a French intellectual from working-class Algiers, a writer raised by a grandmother who could not read and a mother who could not read and could scarcely speak. And he discovered mortality as an athletic teenager, when he began to cough up blood from his tubercular lungs.

But these facts were not themselves absurd. Camus held that absurdity bleeds into our lives only when we ask it for meaning and hear instead an "unreasonable silence." At that moment, he wrote, the "stage setting" of our lives collapses, leaving us with neither script nor director. Can we live without the reassurance, once provided by religion and faith, that transcendent meaning exists? Is it possible, he asked, to live our lives "without appeal"?

Camus is famous for two works that plumb absurdity. In "The Stranger," Meursault senselessly kills a man — an act the absurdity of which is revealed only when others demand in vain a reason. "The Myth of Sisyphus," in turn, considers the punishment meted out to the mythical king of Corinth, condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountainside, only to watch it roll back down. Both heroes overcome their absurd fate by embracing it, by making it their own. We must, Camus concluded, imagine them happy.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zaretsky-camus-centennial-20131107,0,2572061.story

[Jim__]

1. Camus's "Algerian Chronicles" was recently translated into English.

The New York Review of Books published a review by Claire Messud. An excerpt:

One Christmas when I was in my early twenties, my mother, my sister, and I returned home from midnight services to find my deeply private and resolutely lapsed father watching John Paul II’s mass at St. Peter’s on television, his face wet with tears. Distressed to see him thus, we asked why he was crying. “Because when I last heard the mass in Latin,” he replied, “I thought I had a religion, and I thought I had a country.” My father, like Albert Camus, was a pied-noir, a French Algerian. Eighteen years Camus’s junior, he grew up in Bab el-Oued, a working-class neighborhood of Algiers not unlike Camus’s Belcourt. There was no money, but my grandfather was an officer in the navy. Camus’s father was killed early in World War I when his son was a year old, and he and his brother were raised by their mother, who was illiterate and almost deaf, their fierce grandmother, and their largely mute barrel-maker uncle.

My father, like Camus, attended the Lycée Bugeaud, where Jacques Derrida was his classmate (“I always did better than him in philosophy,” my father said), and the Faculté, where he studied law. In 1952, he departed for the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship—the list of French recipients that year shows him to be the lone student from Algeria—and thereafter he would always live in exile, in France, Australia, or North America. But surely he left home without appreciating that it would prove impossible to return.

My grandfather, just eight years older than Camus, hailed from still more modest origins in Blida, southwest of Algiers. His mother, an elementary school teacher and the daughter of an illiterate garçon de café, raised four children alone. The youngest, my grandfather, was, like Camus, a beneficiary of the meritocratic French education system of the period, and made his way from remote poverty to the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, after which he entered the navy as a career officer. A devout Catholic and passionate French patriot, he also adored his native Algeria: letters between my grandparents wax as lyrical about their beloved landscapes as they do about each other.

Nobody in my family ever spoke about the Algerian War. They told many stories about the 1930s and 1940s, when my father and aunt were children; but of what happened later, they were silent. In 1955, my grandfather took a position in Rabat, Morocco, and my grandparents did not live in Algeria again. In the late 1950s, when the war in Algeria was at its most fevered and vicious, my father was doing graduate work on Turkey at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard: after his death, among his papers from that period, I found files of clippings on political upheavals in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, India, Morocco, Libya, in addition to Turkey—but not one word about his homeland. My father’s lonely tears twenty-five years ago were, as far as I know, his only expression of emotion about what happened.

...

[HuckleB]

2. I look forward to adding it to my book queue.

It's amazing that it took so long...

[bemildred]

3. Thanks, I'll get it.

He has been a touchstone for me all my life.

Mme. Messud writes well herself.

Mme. De Beauvoir wrote "The Second Sex", and for that I will forgive her everything else.

In the difficult hour we are living, what else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking point. A. Camus ‘Return to Tipasa’

[The Stranger]

4. My poster name namesake.

Merci, Monsieur.

Plus heureux des anniversaires.

[bemildred]

5. Avec plaisir.