Albert Camus has to be one of my all-time favourite writers because he makes you aware of what literature can do, or at least that’s how he affects me. I’m not sure I entirely approve of the word ‘impact’ being used as a verb, but it’s an accurate description of the experience of reading Camus; he impacts upon me, leaving novel-sized marks stamped onto my soul.
In November this year, we celebrated his centennial year and several wonderful anecdotes about the man cropped up in newspaper pieces everywhere. The one that I liked most was the one given by Jean Daniel, who is a great French journalist and Camus's last living friend.
It’s the summer of 1951, and Camus’s book-length essay The Rebel will soon be published. The writer has taken his mother to a party with friends in Paris. After dancing with several women, Camus leans over and tells his mother that he’s been invited to the presidential palace. She is nearly deaf, so he repeats: “Mother, I've’ been invited to the Elysée!” Madame Camus is silent for a long moment. Then she takes her son’s ear and shouts: “Don't go, my boy! It’s not for us! It’s not for us!” .Camus never went to the Elysée, of course. The only palace this son of a cleaning woman ever entered was in Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize, and even then he went with much reluctance.
Born into extreme poverty, young Albert's family received a state pension after his father was killed fighting in World War I. He was a scholarship student educated by charismatic schoolmasters who had whisked him through the standard lycée curriculum, a writer raised by a grandmother who could not read and a mother who could not read and could scarcely speak. Although a socialist at heart, he was less prone to romanticizing the proletariat as his one-time good friend and later rival Jean Paul Sartre did, because for Camus words like “exploitation” and “subsistence” were gleaned not from revolutionary brochures but from life itself.
Camus was also a vigorous defender of human liberty, during the Algerian War of Independence he refused to choose a side between France which was his adopted homeland and Algeria which was the country of his birth. When he was heckled by an Algerian student in Stockholm, he said “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” Camus simply could not choose between the love of country and the love for his people. This reduced him to what he called an "Impotent Silence".
Camus taught me that in the hardest moments, one can do nothing but to keep on living. Live the best way you know how. Move. Be kind. Be equanimous. Do what you can, but don’t waste your life feeling guilty or helpless or anxious. Get up in the morning and get your runners on and go outside and breathe the fresh air. Hug someone you don’t know. Practice acts of quiet rebellion in your everyday life. Rebel against anger, against traffic, against that wheel of thought that grinds you down. Rebel against your own mistaken beliefs about how the world is.
“My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
Truly yours,
Albert Camus”
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