Posts tagged camus
Stupidity Getting Its Way
Expending tremendous energy merely to be normal
And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in the metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need of I of so many efforts? The soft line of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more
(Source: thispolarbee, via sunrec)
Likewise and during every day of an unremarkable life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: ‘tomorrow’, ‘later on’, ‘when you have made your way’, ‘you will understand when you are old enough’. Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation of time. He takes place in it. He admits that he stand at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.
(Source: nerdscloset, via sunrec)
In ancient drama, the one who pays is always the one who is right – Prometheus, Oedipus, Orestes, etc. But that’s not important. Anyway they all end in Hades, right or wrong. There is neither reward nor punishment. This explains, to our eyes clouded over by centuries of Christian perversion, the gratuitous nature of those dramas – and the pathos of such plays.
(Source: sisyphean-revolt, via literarylust)
The Death of Albert Camus - January 4th, 1960
From: Albert Camus, A Biography by Herbert R. Lottman.
At the time of the accident — Michel Gallimard at the wheel, Camus seated at his right (without seat belts; they were not a common accessory then) — they were not moving at what the Gallimards would have considered excessive speed. Michel usually drove more slowly when he had someone to talk to, and they were talking in the car. Janine, in the rear with Anne, was aware of nothing untoward, heard no exclamation or other comment of her husband. She felt as if she were suddenly on a curve (the road was a straight line now) and that something had collapsed — like the gearbox beneath them. Then she was sitting or lying in a field, in a state of shock. She was discovered calling for her dog Floc.
As the accident was reconstructed by police and the press, the Gallimard car had swerved off the road — whose surface was slightly damp from January drizzle — smashed into one of the tall plane trees lining the highway, then wrapped around a second tree some forty feet further on. Camus was thrown backward against the rear window, thrust through, his skull fractured, neck broken; he died instantly. It took two hours to disengage his body. Michel Gallimard was found on the ground, bleeding profusely, and was removed quickly to a local hospital. Janine was near her husband, in shock; leash in hand, she was indeed calling for her dog. Anne, splattered with mud, was in a field sixty-five feet from the car. Neither woman appeared seriously hurt, but they were also taken to the hospital.
…The dashboard clock was stopped at 1:54 P.M. or 1:55, generally taken as the precise time of the accident. But accounts varied as to whether the speedometer needle was stuck at 145 kilometers per hour (about 90 mph) or read zero.
(via literarylust)
Doubtless today many of our fellow citizens are apt to yield to temptation of exaggerating the services they rendered. But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing over-importance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue, the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
(Source: acknowledgetheabsurd, via literarylust)
[At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains.] At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.
You only demand clarity because you’re too comfortable within your vagueness; You only feel insufficient because you’re extremely fearful of unconditionally caring.
Awesome photographs of Albert Camus
Third last photo: Camus (third from right) with the team of Alger-Republican on the day of publication of the first issue in 1936
Second last photo: Camus with Jean-Paul Sartre
Last photo: Camus with Jean Grenier, French philosopher and Camus’ teacher.
“I remember my visit with you in Belcourt, it must have been ten years ago. In your eyes I represented Society, but for me you have never been “L’Etranger.”
Jean Grenier, Albert Camus & Jean Grenier, Correspondence: 1932-1960
