Albert Camus - "The Rebel" (an essay on the man in revolt)

"Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law."

p4. "But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence - through a curious transposition peculiar to our times - it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself."

p5. "Each day at dawn, assassins in judges' robes slip into some cell: murder is the problem today."

p6. "The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe."

p10. "The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion. Deprived of all knowledge, incited to murder or to consent to murder, all I have at my disposal is this single piece of evidence, which is only reaffirmed by the anguish I suffer. Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. [...] Rebellion engenders exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion finds its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere."

p15. "The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself. It becomes for him the supreme good. Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts ("because this is how it must be . . .") an attitude of All or Nothing. With rebellion, awareness is born."

p17. "... the rebel's aim is to defined what he is. He does not merely claim some good that he does not possess or of which he was deprived. His aim is to claim recognition for something which he has and which has already been recognized by him, in almost every case, as more important than anything of which he could be envious."

p18. "The rebel, [...] refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose."

p19. "We insist that the part of man which cannot be reduced to mere ideas should be taken into consideration - the passionate side of his nature that serves no other purpose than to be part of the act of living."

p20. "...the spirit of rebellion finds few means of expression in societies where inequalities are very great (the Hindu caste system) or, again, in those where there is absolute equality (certain primitive societies). The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities."

Albert Camus - "The Fall"

• choice of words: Dutch are "primates"
• hearing a Frenchman describe my country
• how talking about de Zuiderzee puts it in a very specific period for me

p27. "To achieve notoriety it is enough, after all to kill one's concierge. Unhappily, this is usually an ephemeral reputation, so many concierges are there who deserve and receive the knife."

p31. "Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it."

p33. "A woman who used to chase after me, and in vain, had the good sense to die young. What room in my heart at once! And when, in addition, it's a suicide! Lord, what a delightful commotion! One's telephone rings, one's heart overflows, and the intentionally short sentences yet heavy with implications, one's restrained suffering and even, yes, a bit of self-accusation!"

p48. "I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty."

p50. "This I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality."

p55. "What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating everyone? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression."

p57. "My relationship with women was natural, free, easy, as the saying goes. No guile in it except that obvious guile which they look upon as a homage. I loved them, according to the hallowed expression, which amounts to saying that I never loved any of them. I always considered misogyny vulgar and stupid, and almost all the women I have known seemed to me better than I. Nevertheless, setting them so high, I made use of them more often than I served them. How can one make it out?"

p63. "Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world."

p66. "I couldn't deceive myself as to the truth of my nature. No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures - have I read that or did I think it myself, mon cher compatriote?"

p67. "Be it said, moreover, that as soon as I had rewon that affection I became aware of its weight. In my moments of irritation I told myself that the ideal solution would have been the death of the person I was interested in. Her death would, on the one hand, have definitely fixed our relationship and, on the other, removed its compulsion. But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, in the extreme, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that cannot be imagined otherwise. My sensibility was opposed to this, and my love of mankind."

p72. "We are reaching the dike. We'll have to follow it to get as far as possible from these too charming houses. Please, let's sit down. Well, what do you think of it? Isn't it the most beautiful negative landscape? Just see on the left that pile of ashes they call a dune here, the gray dike on the right, the livid beach at our feet, and in front of us, the sea the color of a weak lye-solution with the vast sky reflecting the colorless waters. A soggy hell, indeed! Everything horizontal, no relief; space is colorless, and life dead."

p76. "Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgottne, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood - never!"

p83. "A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness. Therefore, if you are in that situation, don't hesitate: promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can. You will satisfy their hidden desire and doubly prove your affection."

p120. "I have ceased to like anything but confessions, and authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know. When they claim to get to the painful admissions, you have to watch out, for they are about to dress the corpse."

Loin des Hommes (Far From Men) (2014)

Beautiful quiet film with Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb about a schoolteacher and a man in Algeria 1954, who, against the backdrop of rebellion, are thrown together for a lonely journey.

Based on the short story "The Guest" (le visiteur?) by Albert Camus.

Amazing emptiness.

Music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Written and directed by David Oelhoffen, somebody to keep looking for.

essay "Navigating the absurd: Camus, Hemingway and the sea"

"Cold hard science, Camus suggests, must ultimately concede to poetry, art, and descriptions. We cannot attain all knowledge, and thus we live in a world full of paradoxes and irrationals."

"While logic suggests suicide as escape from a painful existence, the very fact that our existence is painful gives meaning to our lives. To those aware of the absurd, there “is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it” (480). Camus esteems this struggle, holding it to be the noblest aspect of being, and suggests that it is the unassailable passion of the heart to defy that helps man achieve greatness feeding on “the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference”(480)."

"a larger motivation keeps Santiago’s old and pulverized hands on the line – the need to prove “what a man can do and what a man endures”. He recognizes that “the thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it”

This is a great article (not finished yet) but I do have a problem with the following statement:

Eddins points out that skin cancer is a manifestation of the dual nature of challenges that Santiago must face. The cancerous spot appears “malevolent in their assault upon the well-being of the organism, but are in another sense ‘benevolent’ in what they force the organism to become through overcoming them” (71).

First of all, malevolent/benevolent suggest a *will* to do harm or good. I have not read much of Camus yet – am on page 10 – but I have not seen any indication that he assigns the absurd, the universe, its irrationality and/or our inability to grasp it, as having a will to do harm or good. Secondly: does this mean that every life-threatening situation or phenomon is “in another sense ‘benevolent'” because of what it forces humanity to become through overcoming it? That somehow feels like an easy generalization to me…