Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Truth, Freedom, and Justice)

“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.” —French novelist, essayist, and playwright—Nobel Literature laureate—Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Three Interviews,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1970)

The loss to the world when Albert Camus died in an automobile accident 65 years ago today is incalculable. At only 46 years old, he was still in the prime of his career.

His death came at a tricky time for the novelist: France’s divisive, debilitating attempt to crush the independence movement of the colony where Camus was born and spent his formative years, Algeria. As a pacifist, he was so anguished by the Algerian War that he said it affected him “as others feel pain in their legs.”

Like his counterpart across the English Channel, George Orwell, Camus issued a clarion call for liberal democracy when it was threatened by totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right. The successors of these two writers are issuing their own warnings about similar perils that confront our age, but so far they are going unheeded.

Maybe it’s time to re-read Camus, to understand, as he demonstrated in his postwar novel The Plague (much discussed at the outbreak of COVID-19), that withstanding pestilences, whether the medical or political kind, requires eternal vigilance lest they return, but ordinary people must maintain their resistance, no matter how great their weariness.

(For a more extended overview of how Camus balanced political activism with engaging with time “on the smallest and most personal scale,” see Maria Popova’s June 2024 post from her blog “The Marginalian.”)