Born right into a World Battle to stay by way of one other, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a automobile crash with an unused practice ticket to the identical vacation spot in his pocket. Simply three years earlier, he had change into the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the issues of the human conscience” — issues like artwork as resistance, happiness as our ethical obligation, and the measure of power by way of troublesome instances.
Throughout WWII, Camus stood passionately on the facet of justice; through the Chilly Battle, he sliced by way of the Iron Curtain with all of the humanistic pressure of easy kindness. However as he watched the world burn its personal future within the fiery pit of politics, he understood that point, which has no proper facet and no wring facet, is barely ever gained or misplaced on the smallest and most private scale: absolute presence with one’s personal life, rooted within the perception that “actual generosity towards the long run lies in giving all to the current.”
Camus addresses this with poetic poignancy in an essay titled “The Incorrect Aspect and the Proper Aspect,” present in his altogether excellent posthumous assortment Lyrical and Important Essays (public library).
In a prescient admonition towards our trendy cult of productiveness, which plunders our capability for presence, Camus writes:
Life is brief, and it’s sinful to waste one’s time. They are saying I’m energetic. However being energetic continues to be losing one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. In the present day is a resting time, and my coronary heart goes off searching for itself. If an anguish nonetheless clutches me, it’s once I really feel this impalpable second slip by way of my fingers like quicksilver… In the mean time, my complete kingdom is of this world. This solar and these shadows, this heat and this chilly rising from the depths of the air: why marvel if one thing is dying or if males undergo, since all the pieces is written on this window the place the solar sheds its lots as a greeting to my pity?
Echoing the younger Dostoyevsky’s exultant reckoning with the which means of life shortly after his demise sentence was repealed (“To be a human being amongst individuals and to stay one ceaselessly, regardless of in what circumstances, to not develop despondent and to not lose coronary heart,” Dostoyevsky wrote to his brother, “that’s what life is all about, that’s its activity.”), Camus provides:
What counts is to be human and easy. No, what counts is to be true, after which all the pieces suits in, humanity and ease. When am I more true than when I’m the world?… What I want for now could be now not happiness however merely consciousness… I maintain onto the world with each gesture, to males with all my gratitude and pity. I don’t need to select between the proper and mistaken sides of the world, and I don’t like a alternative… The nice braveness continues to be to gaze as squarely on the gentle as at demise. In addition to, how can I outline the hyperlink that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?… Regardless of a lot looking out, that is all I do know.
These reflections led Camus to conclude that “there isn’t a love of life with out despair of life”; out of them he drew his three antidotes to the absurdity of life and the essential query at its middle.
Couple with George Saunders — who often is the closest we’ve to Camus in our time — on the way to love the world extra, then revisit Wendell Berry’s poetic antidote to despair.
