Word: camus
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Resistance, Rebellion, and Death a good introduction to Camus. curious are advised, by this at least, to begin with The of Slayphus and The Plague. for those already acquainted Camus' work, Knopf has here a powerful collection of essays and excerpts, some elsewhere in English, h will be a valuable addition any libraries...
...them are dated. The to a German Friend, in 1943 and 1944, seem obsolete now in reference both to history and to Camus' later writings. In the Preface for the Italian Edition, where the third and fourth letters were published for the first time, Camus explains: "I am contrasting two attitudes, not two nations, even if, at a certain moment in history, these two nations personified two enemy attitudes." And this is true, for the Resistance Frenchman, addressing a former comrade, is inclined to equate moral rectitude with winning wars, or at least to make the latter seem a result...
This spirit is supplemented by the tribute to Rene Leynaud, written just after his death in 1944. Many have found Camus' undefined and imprecise use of the words "honor" and "decency" confusing: here is their explanation. A precis would be unfair, but Leynaud, who "never bargained about anything", will be recognized in his resemblance to Dr. Rieux in The Plague. When you have read the description of Leynaud, turn to Homage to an Exile, later in the volume, and read these sentences: "I cannot love all humanity except with a vast and somewhat abstract love. But I love...
...Unbeliever and Christians, excerpted from a statement made in 1948 at the Dominican monastery of Latour-Mauborg in Paris, the reader will find baldly stated one tenet of Camus' entire outlook, echoing again and again through his works: "Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." One thinks again of The Plague, and of the priest Paneloux who learned that suffering demands resistance, and that tyranny, in whatever form, cannot be excused by either its transcendental value or its universality...
...further development of this thought is in Why Spain?, a reply to Gabriel Marcel's stinging attack on Camus' play, Etat de Slege. Enslavement, metaphysical or historical, has only one answer--rebellion. And Camus is not "willing to keep silent about one reign of terror in order the better to combat another one". "The world I live in," he explains, "is loathsome to me. But I feel one with the men who suffer in it." Camus began, politically and philosophically, where his generation stopped: at despair. But in spite of and in a way because of despair, he continued...