Monday, February 12, 2018

On Albert Camus


"Each time a writer writes, he puts a little of his soul into his work.
As his work grows, a spectator is allowed a peek inside his mind.
It is kaleidoscopic. Shards of glass seen in white light. 
Bedazzling! So the reader must be careful, 
Shield his eyes from time to time. 
As he goes about writing, in some he puts a little of his spirit, 
In others he dips these shards into hues 
Of other peoples reality and personality, 
Thus giving us a reflection of his heart, 
And inadvertently a picture of the life and times 
Of which he is an inextricable part. 
And this is how he stands at the center of it all, 
A witness and narrator, 
Retelling our stories, critiquing, romanticizing life and art.

Anchal Sharma

Courtesy: Ehnemark, Jan via Wikimedia Commons

A beautiful line comes to my mind as I think of this. 

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." 
-Albert Camus

I don’t think that I would be able to go on here without mentioning Camus and his contribution to literature and philosophy.

Born into a poverty stricken pied noir family with a cat named Cigarette, the professional quirk of writing while standing, and Jean-Paul Sartre as a friend turned lifelong rival, Albert Camus was the second youngest person and the first African born writer to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 for his work "Reflexions sur la Guillotine" (Reflections on the Guillotine) against capital punishment.

There is no teacher like Life, because she lives with you from the moment of your inception until your dying breath. “You cannot create experience, you must undergo it”, he said once and so Life taught him much. It was a different world then where people led strange lives during a difficult war time.  And so, Camus wrote much about human frailties, exposed the internal working of man’s psyche, and became a firm proponent of the concept of ‘Absurdism’ which finds speech in his famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus’.

Armed with naked language that needed no support of extravagant words, and thoughts stripped away of all superfluity, Albert Camus was a writer whose works till date are an exposè on the veritable ramblings and musings of a common man.