The men of my race arrive on wingless, eyeless ships. -Andre Malraux-
His childhood taught him a singular understanding of misery, which made his empathy with the disempowered genuine. (skip) a hatred of intolerance,
"religious atheism." Its philosophical proponents, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers, were all radical invidulualists and sophisticated intellectuals. Whatever their youthful concerns or their political passions, as mature thinkers they belonged to no church, embraced no form of religious dogma, and founded no mass movement.
All of them emphasized the role of personal experience and the responsibility of the individual in shaping his or her fate.
"One solitary geranium, its leaves both pink and red, and a great silent feeling of losss and sadness that teaches us to know the pure and beautiful face of death"
<The Stranger>
a man commited to remaking his life in the shadow of death.
Meursault, is that man. Society must elicit a reason for his actions, and since he refuses to provide one, the prosecutor portrays him as a cold-blooded psychopath. (skip) The act without purpose indeed mirrors a world without meaning.
Society offers no answers. Its hypocritical moralism is reflected in trial of Meursault
"What the priest attempts to do, in Meursault's eyes, is to steal from him that life which has become his good in the face of death, to take away the value which has revealed itself against the background of death."
<Sisyphus>
the lack of a predetermined meaning creates the possibility of living life more fully, and this possibility can only become manifest by "keeping the absurd alive"
a new existensial challenge: the possibility of experiencing happiness without hope.
(나는 여기서 happiness라는 표현은 Camus의 의도에서 볼 때 적절치 않은 듯하다. life itself 라고 표현하는 것이 더 맞는 표현일 듯하다.)
Young people all over the worldin the 1930s considered democracy impotent, humanism worthless, and individualizm decadant. (skip) Millions were sacrificed and many millions more suffered war and deprivation for these utopian ends.
To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living. (in Caligula)
<The Plague>
Its sober prose, its careful construction, and its deliberate understatement all contribute to its enduring success. (skip) "no question of heroism in all of this. It's matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting the plague is - common decency."
the just society of the future cannot rest on the sacrifice of innocent individuals in the present.
Politics are made for men and not men for politics. We do not want to live on fables. In the world of violence and death around us, there is no place for hope. But perhaps there is room for civilization, for real civilization, which puts truth before fables and life before dreams. And this civilization has nothing to do with hope. In it, man lives on his truths.
To understand this world, one must sometimes turn away from it; to serve men better, one must briefly hold them at a distance. (in Summer)
No man can say what he is. But sometimes he can say what he is not. Every one wants the man who is still searching to have already reached his conclusions. (in The Enigma)
the famous words by Walter Benjamin:"Only for the sake of the hopeless is hope given to us."
Poor people's memory (skip) it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewere reference points in time throughout lives that are gray and featureless. Of course there is the memory ofthe heart that they say it is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labor, it forgets sooner undre the weight of fatigue. Rememberance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death. (In The First Man)
He refused to bend his principles in response to the exigencies of political pratice,
Perhaps because he had turberculosis, he never turned death into a fetish as Heidegger did, and surely because he once knew real poverty, he never idealized the poor as Sartre did.
(skip) Sisyphus, Meursault, Rieux, and the rest all exhibit a mixture of skepticism and tolerance, lucidity and courage, a sense of responsibility and a willingness to learn. Even Clamence had his moments. (skip) he worte of Sartre's Nausea that "in a good novel all the philosophy is passed along through the images."
"We must serve justice because our condition is unjust, increase happiness and joy because this universe is unhappy. Likewise, we must not condemn others to death because we have been given the death sentence." (In Notebooks)
Camus wanted to make people face themselves.
only by recognizing the vanity of attempting to change everything is it possible to change some things.
- '내가 원하는 한 마디를 하지 못할까 두렵다.'라고 했던 카뮈의 글은 내가 하고자 하는 모든 것을 말해주는 듯하다. 그의 글과 행동, 그 어떤 것도 나의 이상보다 더 가까운 것은 없다. 카뮈가 말하는 'common decency', 과연 현대를 살아가는 인간들에게 얼마나 남아있는가?
부조리한 세상에서 살아나가는 인간 존재 자체를 극진한 눈으로 바라보는 카뮈는 20세기의 Prometheus인 듯 느껴진다. 인간의 나약함과 부조리함을 알면서도 그 인간에 대한 믿음을 놓지 않는, 사회와 조직, 이념에 의해 인간의 의미를 잃고 희생되어가는 것을 안타까워하는, 카뮈의 긍정이 그의 글 속에 녹아 여태 마음을 울린다.
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