Brilliant writer, intelligent, insightful and talented at the art of words, but after reading all of his fiction novels (I don’t have the patience for essays), I gotta say I don’t think he ever experienced pure, agonizing, suicidal pain himself. And that’s why his philosophy fails on me.
In a nutshell, his recurring philosophy can be summed up like this:
Life is absurd, essentially meaningless, but we should rebel against the meaningless and create meaning.
Sure, that’s fine. But not when you’re dealing with an agony so deep and maddening that you can’t fucking think straight. To use the metaphor of the 9/11 jumper: those faced with the pain of burning alive chose suicide and jumped to their deaths. You don’t sit there burning alive, patting yourself on the back for rebelling against the pointlessness. You just fucking end it. In a sense, that’s the rebellion that Camus failed to see.
I mean, the guy was a good looking, reasonably privileged white man living in north africa. If his stories were any indication of autobiography, he had no trouble finding hot women, finding employment, enjoying the pleasures of life. He eventually married the love of his life who doubtlessly encouraged him to write and find enormous success.
Appropriately the protagonists in his books were free, unhindered, untortured, or even rich & powerful like the doctor in The Plague or the judge in The Fall. Camus never showed any true understanding of how it feels to have a fucking shit shitty shit life where every day you get more lashings, more insults and injuries to add to the burden of existence.
idk man. I guess what I’m saying is that Camus, for all his writings on the subject of suicide (he begins the book “The Rebel” by saying that suicide is the only important question we face) that he just didn’t fucking get it. And I think that’s what’s wrong with society in its failure to understand why we kill ourselves. When you view it from a position of safety or privilege, it’s easy to say “imagine Sisyphus happy!” What a fucking dumbass statement to say. Ever been crushed by a boulder?