Today is the eleventy-first anniversary of the birth of Albert Camus, who pointed out in a number of ways that whatever you do, whatever you accomplish, whatever you dream of, whether you achieve it or not…nobody cares. Well, some people might care, but the universe we live in doesn’t give a fig. He laid this out most clearly in The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay published in 1942. Sisyphus is the figure in Greek mythology who’s punished by the gods to forever roll a boulder up a mountain and have it roll back to the bottom just before reaching the top. Its last line is “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus’ philosophy has been labeled “absurdism,” which doesn’t mean the world is absurd, nor is human thought — everything becomes absurd when the “appetite for the absolute and for unity” confronts “the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.” Camus himself was not pleased with the label.
It’s not an accident that Camus published that essay in 1942. He started working on it in 1940 when Nazi Germany invaded France. It affected millions of people, and Camus began to think about how something banal, as well as something as significant as an invasion, will make people ask the same question: “why?”
Camus was born in French Algeria, and studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. When the Germans invaded he joined the French Resistance, but not as a fighter or clandestine operative — he became an editor. He was the editor-in-chief of Combat, a newspaper that had been outlawed by the Nazis. It would seem like being a newspaper editor would attract notice, and it did, but Camus used a pen name and carried fake identity cards, and was never captured. He continued as editor after the war, writing daily editorials, but finally under his own name.
He lived in Paris after the war and was celebrated as a writer and for his role in the Resistance. He had joined the French Communist Party before the war in spite of not really believing in Marxism, but hoped the party would help the situation of the poor and oppressed he had witnessed (and lived with) growing up in Algeria. But he broke with the party after the war and began criticizing communism because of the totalitarianism of communist governments. He preferred a more libertarian socialism, which political scientists classify as “anarcho-syndicalism.” (I don’t really know what that is and haven’t looked it up yet.) Many of his colleagues in the intellectual circles of Paris at the time were quite upset with him, and his former friend Jean-Paul Sartre stopped speaking to him.
Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and was reportedly shocked by it. He had expected the French novelist André Malraux to win. He was just 44, and became the second-youngest prize winner (after Rudyard Kipling, who had been 42). The financial prize was substantial enough to enable him to return to writing plays, as he had before WWII. He also began his autobiography, Le Premier Homme, and wrote that he intended it to explore “moral learning.”
Camus died in an automobile accident in 1960 when he was just 46. He was traveling from a New Year’s holiday back to Paris in his publisher’s car, and the publisher lost control of the car and hit a tree. The first 144 pages of Le Premier Homme were found in the wreckage. William Faulkner wrote an obituary for Camus, saying “When the door shut for him he had already written on this side of it that which every artist who also carries through life with him that one same foreknowledge and hatred of death is hoping to do: I was here.”
Camus’ novels, short stories, plays, essays, and nonfiction books are often still in print, and are still worth reading. Le Premier Homme was never finished, but what he did leave was published in 1994. His most famous work is probably The Stranger, which is sometimes titled in English The Outsider.
