Albert Camus -- forever modern [View all]

[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