The Start of the Camus Affair
Anyone with a hint of sapiosexual tendency must adore Camus, no?
I met this enigmatic man while swiping a quaint video just years ago. Roughly translated from French —
“Today happiness is like a crime — never admit it. Don’t say ‘I’m happy’ otherwise you will hear condemnation all around.”
“’So you’re happy, young man? What do you do with orphans from Kashmir? Or the New Zealand lepers who aren’t “happy” as you say?’”
“Yes what to do with the lepers? How to get rid of them as Ionesco would say? And all of a sudden, we are sad as toothpicks.”
He is the first European philosopher I started researching about, after Nietzsche. Nothing like a bright dose of Absurdism after a bout of Nihilism and Ubermensch-ian directives.
Camus feels like that one woke dude who just lived his life. That’s lucid. Attractive.
Pinterest/Tumblr will point out to you that he’s handsome. But the real magic lies in the way his smile creases the corners of a pair of glinting eyes, as the thinker puts forth neat, explosive opinions on existentialist dilemmas such as the will to live, and expounds on the qualitative factors of a sapient life. His broad body of work weaves Absurdism and revolt as existential elements of a life that is bravely, deliberately lived.
I have been consulting his volumes of Notebooks, watching translated video recordings, and have so far only managed to read The Stranger in entirety. The Stranger was a ‘curiouser and curiouser’ affair. Its protagonist floats through life with an aloofness and abruptness of psyche that is in dissonance with that of the general society’s. He is visibly emotionless at the death of his mother, remorseless after he murders a man later. A social pariah, a Stranger, who doesn’t mechanically conform to the Kafkaesque demands of bourgeois civility — is simply condemned to death. His apathetic peculiarity dooms him.
Intensely absurd, yes? Yet, it has held up a faithful mirror to the human condition in our disturbingly absurd world since it appeared in 1942.
Only fundamental truths have the power to resonate with us. Nothing else can claim such vivid, rich portion of our fickle attention.
Do we ever truly dare to dissect who we are? And if / when we finally do — do we not find ourselves staring into the eyes of a stranger in the mirror?
It is said that a man cannot step into the same river twice — for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. It is absurd to demand to know one’s self completely at any point of time. {I am somewhat inclined to think that those who do know themselves, know their selves along the lines of the Bhagavad Gita shloka - You are not your thoughts or feelings or a soul captured momentarily in a physical body, you are Consciousness Itself.}
Post the weird fiction that is The Stranger, what has seeped permanently into my worldview is that each one of us is not only a stranger to the world, as Camus says, but a stranger to our own self.
I do not know who I am. And you are a stranger to yourself. We will never fully know who we truly are.
That’s life. Absurd.
But this doesn’t mean we can’t have our fun or live our lives with more sass than sad toothpicks.
And that’s the beguiling essence of Camus’s Absurdism for me.
In personal celebration of the aforementioned love affair, I am noting seven Camus quotes that have, time and again, turned on my lights.
On originality and fidelity to one’s self -
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought together?” This is a practical question. We must get down to it. “I despise intelligence” really means: “I cannot bear my doubts.”
— -.- —
On self-reliance -
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.”
— -.- —
And finally, the crispiest philosopher’s version of good morning ever -
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
— -.- —
To me, Albert Camus, the 1913 Algerian-born French philosopher, theatre-lover, journalist, political activist, professional charmer and genius, is a conspicuous example of what they call the man, the myth, the legend.
Of course I’m in love.
