Camus was haunted by these images, intensified as they were by a life of personal isolation beginning with the death of his father in World War I when he was a year old and continuing throughout his upbringing by a half-deaf, emotionally sterile mother. His entire life, including his tragic art, was an attempt to find a way out of this closed world. This was his search.
That is why he continues to speak today to those who grapple with the same enigmas, those who strive to find hope and faith to defend the defenseless and revel in the glory of living simultaneously. Not absurdly, he left clues to that quest in his briefcase on the road where he died the unfinished manuscript to his beautiful Le Premier Homme (The First Man). It was as if, whether he died in an accident or was murdered, the first man was going to have the last word.
In his last novel, The Fall, he left us Jean Baptiste Clamence, a nihilist worthy of our times, a lawyer dedicated to abstract justice, a phony actor who, in the name of absolute sincerity, lies in order to mask his destructive nihilism that knows no bounds. He reminds me of our power elites. His maxim cuts to the heart of our modern madness:
"When one has no character, one has to apply a method."
Albert Camus had character. Let us honor him.
"I can imagine Camus saying with Hamlet:
Oh, I could tell you
But let it be, Horatio, I am dead;
Thou livest; report to me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied."
Let us do just that.
(Article changed on January 4, 2020 at 11:24)
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