Sublime

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths.

roots. The journalist and short-story writer Albert Camus, who had come to the city from his home in Algeria, holed himself up in a room and listened to the street sounds outside his window, wondering why he was there. ‘Foreign, admit that I find everything strange and foreign’, he wrote in his notebook in March 1940. ‘No future’, he added in an

Pauvre Morel, dit-il. Il s'est mis dans une situation impossible. Personne n'est jamais arrivé à résoudre cette contradiction qu'il y a à vouloir défendre un idéal humain en compagnie des hommes. Adieu. »

There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These explanations are plausible.

the problem and the solution comes afterward.

Camus examine les vies possibles : vie de séducteur et de libertin comme Don Juan ; vie de comédien brûlant les planches pour obtenir une gloire absurde ; vie de voyageur qui accumule les expériences dépourvues de sens dans les pays collectionnés ; vie de conquérant ajoutant des peuples à son Empire. Mais chaque fois ces existences composent avec

you really can’t do anything about people’s lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning, ineluctably, with the odd mistake, a few errors when there’s sickness in the mix,

On this plane, at least, there is no happiness if I cannot know.