Word: camus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lacks only one component-truth. As two newly reissued volumes show, Camus was not a mourner of the human condition but its celebrant. The two-volume Notebooks (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $3.95 each) follow the writer from 1935 to 1951 and neatly cleave the legend from the man. In the process they show why his formal works are as pertinent as the day they were written, a world...
...course there were problems-philosophical, psychological and physical. Camus, afflicted by tuberculosis, struggled merely to survive. "Illness is a convent," he writes, "which has its rule, its austerity, its silences, and its inspirations...
...postwar epoch was not clear and the artist continued to compose. His underground newspaper was called Combat. That might have served as the subtitle for all of Camus's work. He tried the Communist Party and found it guilty of hypocrisy. He refused to endorse extremist positions on either side of the Algerian struggle for independence. "I must condemn a terrorism which strikes blindly in the streets ..." he declared, "and which one day might strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice." The famous phrase caused Camus...
Given this pugilistic stance, this unwillingness to cut his conscience to fit the reigning Paris fashions, it is not surprising that Camus became a figure of global controversy. It was a difficult role to assume; he struggled with it until his death, aware that any political or artistic statement would be distorted. "One never says a quarter of what one knows," he confessed. "Otherwise all would collapse. How little one says, and they are already screaming." Even posthumously the man was not safe. In the '60s the New York Times listed him as one of seven heroes...
...essays are often contradictory or downright muddy: "Man, at bottom, is not entirely guilty, since he did not begin history; nor entirely innocent, since he continues it." Nor, despite lifelong claims and yearnings, was Camus a true philosopher, with an organized system of thought. But he is frequently something more valuable: a reliable witness. Observes Critic Wilfrid Sheed: "Like Thomas Aquinas, who 'saw' something just before his death that made all his writings seem like straw," men like Albert Camus "seem to have 'seen something' which makes a good deal, anyway, seem like straw . . . What they...