“Jean-Paul Sartre, had preceded him to New York in 1945. Playing the role of existentialism’s John the Baptist, Sartre spoke at great length about Camus to a reporter from, of all places, the American edition of Vogue.”
“Liebling noted in his “Talk of the Town” article, “M. Camus seemed unduly cheerful.” When Liebling asked why, Camus replied: “Just because you have pessimistic thoughts, you don’t have to act pessimistic. One has to pass the time somehow. Look at Don Juan.””
“In “La crise de l’homme,” or “The Crisis of Man” — the title he gave to his talk — Camus set himself an enormous task. To a packed auditorium of mostly young Americans, he sought to convey the character and consequences of events that, while scarcely touching his audience, had ravaged Europe.”
““The men and women of my generation,” he began,
were born just before or during World War One, reached adolescence in time for the Great Depression, and turned 20 years old when Hitler took power. To complete our education, we were offered the Spanish Civil War, Munich, and another world war followed by defeat, occupation, and resistance.”
“Camus tells his listeners that he did not choose these stories to shock them, but because they illustrate the crisis of man the world now confronted. The crisis, quite simply, is the fruit of a world where torture is not only practiced but evokes little more than indifference with the torturers and acceptance among its witnesses.”
“When our response to the killing or torturing of a fellow human being is anything other than horror and outrage; when we consider the deliberate infliction of pain as no more disturbing than standing in line for our daily food rations; when we have reached this point, we must accept that the world will not improve simply because Hitler is gone.”
“Scanning the hall, Camus declared: “We are all of us responsible and we are duty-bound to seek the causes of the terrifying evil that still gnaws at the soul of Europe.””
“Against this bleak diagnosis of our condition, Camus offered a prescription nearly as bleak. While there was no reason for hope, this was not a reason to despair. We can solve this crisis, he announced, only “with the values we still have at hand — in a word, the awareness of the absurdity of our lives.””
““There is just one truly important philosophical question: suicide. To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” This question confronts us the day that, finding ourselves in “a universe suddenly divested of illusions and light,” we nevertheless insist on meaning. If our “irrational and wild longing for clarity” is met by “the unreasonable silence of the world,” Camus wonders, is suicide the only reasonable response? Is it possible, he demanded, “to live without appeal”?”
“In a world shorn of sense, he stated, too many people had concluded that whoever succeeded was right, and whatever was right was measured by success.”
“For those who resisted this conclusion, for those unwilling to live in a world of victims and torturers, neither faith nor philosophy offered a resource. Instead, the only source of justification “was in the very act of rebellion.” What we fought for, Camus concluded, “was something common not just to us, but to all human beings. Namely, that man still had meaning.””
“the rebel imposes a limit on her own self”
“Rebellion is a defensive, not offensive, act; it is equipoise, not a mad charge against an opponent, one that demands attending to one’s own humanity as well as that of others.”
“Just as the absurd never authorizes despair, much less nihilism, a tyrant’s acts never authorize one to become tyrannical in turn.”
“The rebel, by embracing a “philosophy of limits,” does not deny his master as a fellow human being, she denies him only as her master; and she resists the inevitable temptation to dehumanize her former oppressor. In the end, rebellion “aspires to the relative and supposes a limit at which the community of man is established.””
“If these words did leave a mark on Americans 70 years ago, can they still do so? What, if anything, would Camus think about the absurdity of our current political climate? It is impossible to say, of course, but what is fairly certain is that he would be as perplexed today by Americans as he was in 1946. The audience’s reaction to the theft at Columbia impressed him deeply; in his journal he noted that it typified “American generosity.” What he found best in us, he wrote, was our “spontaneous friendliness and warmth.””
“But other traits impressed him less. While he praised our generosity, he worried about our naïveté. Though he lauded our role in liberating France, he lambasted our decision to liberate the atom. Attracted by our hospitality, he was repelled by our superficiality. “The secret to conversation here,” he believed, “is to talk in order to say nothing.””
“In the one published work based on his visit to the US, a short essay titled “The Rains of New York,” he confessed that after several weeks in the city, he
still [knew] nothing about New York, whether one moves about among madmen here or among the most reasonable people in the world; whether life is as easy as all America says, or whether it is as empty here as it sometimes seems; […] whether it serves any purpose that the circus in Madison Square Garden puts on ten simultaneous performances in four different rings, so that you are interested in all of them and can watch none of them.”
“Camus’s confusion over Americans has become our confusion, while his observations cut as deeply today as they did 70 years ago. The 40 rings of our political circus, with its mixture of madness and reason, the easiness of the talk about torture and the emptiness of analyses by our media: all of this carries echoes from that night at the McMillin Theater. This confusion will not end soon, but what must begin, as Camus told his audience, is weighing our words. We need, he declared, “to call things by their proper names and understand that we murder millions of human beings when we allow us to think certain thoughts.””