Word: camus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Even in an age when oversimplification often passes for understanding, your shallow condensation of Albert Camus and existentialism is remarkable. TIME has summarily dismissed one of the great yea-sayers of the 20th century...
Alone with his elemental fear of death, modern man is especially troubled by the prospect of a meaningless death and a meaningless life-the bleak offering of existentialism. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," wrote Albert Camus, "and that is suicide." In other words, why stay alive in a meaningless universe? The existentialist replies that man must live for the sake of living, for the things he is free to accomplish. But despite volumes of argumentation, existentialism never seems quite able to justify this conviction on the brink of a death that is only a trap door...
Brilliantly prosed and composed by Yukio Mishima, a 40-year-old novelist and playwright (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) who has been called "the Japanese Camus," The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is obviously intended as a major work of art -as an Oriental transfiguration of the novel of the absurd, and as a crypto-sociological study of the homicidal hysteria that, in Author Mishima's opinion, lies latent in the Japanese character. Unhappily, the book turns out to be simply a diabolically skillful thriller...
...Godless Christian thinkers admit that they are a long way from working out a coherent theology. Understandably, they feel a certain anguish because the direction of their thought leads them to feel greater sympathy for Camus than for clergymen of their own churches. Nonetheless, they argue that God's disappearance from human history cannot be denied, and that there is nothing wrong with a Christian accepting this as a fact. As Hamilton asks, in his book The New Essence of Christianity: "If Jesus can wonder about being forsaken by God, are we to be blamed if we wonder...
...National Geographies and Mary Roberts Rinehart, now often runs to Pasternak and Proust, to Galbraith and Gideon's Trumpet. Even in the remotest fishing village, the drugstore often offers a conscience-pricking range of paperback titles. Inevitably, as he scoops up Louis Fischer's Life of Lenin, Camus' The Plague, George Orwell's Essays, and four Ian Flemings for insurance, the vacationer is torn between dreams of intellectual grandeur and the gnawing suspicion that he will only finish the Flemings. Once again, the seasonal Shakespeare skimmer might observe, vaulting ambition hath o'erleaped itself...