Word: camus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Despair. It was in 1942, when all humanity "stood at the open door of Hell," that France first heard of him, in his bleak first novel, The Stranger, set in a death cell, and then in a collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus explained his doctrine of the absurd. Its first words are: "There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide," and its conclusion is that in a world with no God, man's only hope is to keep the absurd alive, and thus suicide is unthinkable. Because Camus articulated despair...
...Promise. When France fell to the Nazis, Camus joined the Resistance in North Africa, eventually made his way to Paris. There, while working for his publisher, Gaston Gallimard, he secretly edited the Resistance newspaper Combat. On the day of liberation, Combat appeared with a Page One editorial. "Out of this dread childbirth," Camus had written, "a revolution is being born. The Paris that fights tonight intends to command tomorrow, not for power but for justice, not for politics but morality." For millions, that was the promise of the peace...
...promise quickly tarnished. Camus' friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, preached his dreary mixture of Marxism and Existentialism; Camus continued to describe the absurd. It was for him a time of "solitary struggle," when all the forces of the old Resistance were falling apart. When Combat seemed in danger of being compromised, Camus quit his job. "He wanted politics with clean hands," explains a former colleague, and many took Camus as symbol of the "betrayed" liberation...
...Question. He paid his own symbolic tribute to the Resistance in his second novel, The Plague, but the book, as Camus noted, was also his most antiChristian. Its theme was man's common struggle to fight evil "without lifting our eyes towards the Heavens where God stays silent." As one character puts it, "Can one become a saint without God?" The question was to be asked in 17 different languages and Camus found himself famous...
Horrified by the nihilism that came out of the 19th century and the tyranny of the 20th, Camus declared "the evil geniuses of contemporary Europe" to be Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. Communism was no better than Naziism, for "all executioners are of the same family." He refused religious and political absolutes. Justice, he said, "is both a concept and a warmth oi soul. Let us ensure that we adopt it in its human aspect without transforming it into the terrible abstract passion which has mutilated so many...