For Camus, It Was Always Personal

If you want to understand the perils of socialism and communism one should read Camus first. The surprising insight one would stumble upon would how these perils overlap with current-day capitalism and democracy. Camus understood that the roots of socialism to democratic misery begins with human nature. The verbs can change but the noun remains constant - humans. Great thoughts on Camus here: 

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Stop me if you’ve already heard this quote. You will find it on greeting cards and T-shirts, at the bottom of emails and the top of posters, on key chains and coffee mugs — including the chipped and scratched one sitting next to my laptop. It was a gift from someone who, if he knew me better, would not have given it to me. It is a line, at least when ripped from its context, that’s suited for a coffee mug, less inspirational than insipid.

The line is taken — better yet, pried — from “Return to Tipasa,” the second to last of the works included in Personal Writings, a newly repackaged and reissued collection of essays by Albert Camus (ably translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy and Justin O’Brien). For those looking for a chapbook of quotations to start each day, be forewarned. The French Algerian writer did not do inspiration.

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Invincible summers suggest indestructible hopes. But Personal Writings reminds us that, just as Camus did not do inspiration, so he also did not do hope. Hope is for suckers like Epimetheus, who disregards his brother Prometheus’ warning and opens Pandora’s box. In that mass of evils, Camus writes, the “Greeks brought out hope at the very last.” Contrary to coffee mug sentiments, hope is, Camus explains, the most terrible of all the evils because it is “tantamount to resignation. And to live is not to be resigned.”

This explains Camus’s paradoxical claim that while there is no reason for hope, that is never a reason to despair. As we face our era’s many crises, a glance at the volume’s shortest essay, “The Almond Trees,” might help. Writing these few pages soon after France declared war on Germany in 1939, Camus tells the reader that the first thing “is not to despair.” Instead, we must simply unite and act:

"Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. […] [I]t is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all."

The quote runs a bit long, but still, it’s a quote I’d like to see on a coffee mug.