Albert Camus *0004
He’s one of the people I respect the most. Especially when it comes to the concept of the absurd—this man was in a league of his own. He hurled sharp, relentless critiques at the absurdities we constantly sense and suffer in everyday life.
But what exactly is absurdity? It’s not some lofty philosophical abstraction you need a PhD to understand. Even people who live on mental cruise control can feel it when something just doesn’t make sense—when logic collapses, when cause and effect fall apart, when the world contradicts itself and no one seems to care. A lot of folks think absurdity is just about politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate corruption, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Absurdity is vast, familiar, and it shows up constantly. And what’s worse, when we’re caught in it, we tend to dress it up as “fate” or excuse it as something inevitable, trying to justify not only our own condition but the absurd society that produced it.
Ironically, Camus died in the very kind of situation he once called the most absurd. He once said, “There is nothing more outrageous than the death of a child, and nothing more absurd than dying in a car accident,” and yet he himself died in a car crash—young and suddenly. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at the age of 44, and by January of 1960, he was gone, not even 47.
His philosophy can be summed up in two words: absurdity and rebellion.
In The Stranger, Camus portrays a world where all human beings, from the moment they’re born, are essentially prisoners on death row—they just don’t know their execution dates yet. And yet when Meursault, the protagonist, is sentenced to death for murder, the crowd jeers at him as if he were any different. Through the figures of priests, prosecutors, judges, lawyers, the nursing home manager where Meursault’s mother stayed, and other people around him, Camus exposes their absurd behaviors and shows how Meursault, failing to fit in anywhere, becomes a true outsider.
Camus was, through and through, an outsider himself. Despite receiving the Nobel and being hailed as one of the greatest minds of his generation, he was treated as someone perpetually out of place. He explored Sartre’s existentialism and even communism when those ideas were all the rage in European intellectual circles, but ultimately rejected them all and lived as a stranger to the ideologies of his time.
He wasn’t from mainland France but from colonial Algeria, and he didn’t come out of any of the prestigious Parisian universities either. Unlike many progressive intellectuals who supported the liberation of colonized nations around the world, Camus received criticism for defending the rights of French settlers living in Algeria—people who, for him, were also just trying to survive.
He witnessed Stalin’s reign of terror firsthand and even joined the Communist Party for a while, but later criticized its hypocrisies and was once again attacked for doing so. He rejected the absurdities that come with power and authority, and insisted that we must rebel against them. He was, in the truest sense, an anarchist—not in the sense of chaos, but as someone who refused to bow to systems that crush the individual. He believed that rebelling against injustice was not only necessary but sacred—an essential virtue that any true intellectual should guard with their life. And honestly, isn’t that a noble and beautiful posture for a thinking person to take? All those ideologies and belief systems are always shouting about how they’ll save humanity, how they’ll bring liberation. But in the end, they end up dividing people, oppressing others, sometimes even killing in the name of “the greater good.” Why? Because in order to preserve internal unity and hold onto power, they need enemies. Camus saw right through this cycle. He coldly dissected the totalitarian tendencies that hid beneath the costumes of socialism and communism, and he mocked them without apology—even as others applauded.
His rebellion against absurdity wasn’t bitter or violent—it was graceful, elegant, and deeply moral. His insights still shine beyond his time, standing as a model for anyone who dares to think clearly and live honestly.
Through Combat, an underground resistance newspaper, Camus actively fought against Nazi fascism. Throughout his life, he never hesitated to speak up about what he believed. A genuine intellectual, he thought, must never distort or conceal the truth—not even under pressure, not even in fear of death. Just like Hermann Hesse, who openly criticized German fascism and was never truly welcomed back by his homeland, Camus paid the price for his courage.
Camus’s prose is rich, sensual, and emotionally precise. In Nuptials and Summer, the collection of essays I read, some of the sentences struck me like lightning—so beautiful and breathtaking that I was moved to tears, more than once. For the first time in my life, I genuinely wanted to learn French, just so I could read his words in the original.
In Jean Grenier’s Albert Camus: A Memoir, written by his lifelong mentor and spiritual companion, I found tender, vivid accounts of Camus’s everyday gestures and thoughts—so detailed, so sincere, that it awakened in me an almost painful longing to meet him, just once, beyond time and space.
Even though I’ve never met him, I miss him. And I hope—no, I long—to meet him again, and again, endlessly.
Comments
Post a Comment