Need to read The Stranger (which at the beginning of the read I was briefly confusing with Stranger In A Strange Land which I also need to read).
Along with passages already highlighted in comments I additionally j’adore:
The vast ocean, the arid desert, the brutal mountains—for Camus, to live in such immutable surroundings was to be confronted with the simple fact that human affairs are desperately precarious. This was an important lesson. It taught him what he would later call la mesure, or “measure”: a Mediterranean value of humility and limits illuminated by the blinding light of the sun.
In a particularly evocative passage near the end of the surviving manuscript, Jacques Cormery, Camus’ novelistic stand-in, thinks of the “powerful, indescribable sensations” of the physical world around him and his “love of bodies,” a love that arouses in him “the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”
I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all the arts of living.
So much I did not know about Camus. Love this: “Then I think of flowers, smiles, the desire for women, and realize that my whole horror of death lies in my anxiety to live.” I feel the pain of that statement.
I love Camus! Return to Tipasa🌺
Inspiring
Excellent.
Need to read The Stranger (which at the beginning of the read I was briefly confusing with Stranger In A Strange Land which I also need to read).
Along with passages already highlighted in comments I additionally j’adore:
Loved this! I've never read anything by Camus but this article really makes me want to.
powerful
So much I did not know about Camus. Love this: “Then I think of flowers, smiles, the desire for women, and realize that my whole horror of death lies in my anxiety to live.” I feel the pain of that statement.
That line hit me in the heartstrings, too. Especially "my whole horror death lies in my anxiety to live."