I am collecting Albert Camus’ seminal work The Myth of Sisyphus from Waterstones bookshop today. I’m hoping that it will give me some insights into his famous quote about integrity.
I read his novels The Plague and The Stranger when I was a teenager because that’s what my older brother had been reading. At school I was studying Cider with Rosie and Lark Rise to Candleford, very different literary styles from Camus.
As a teenager at a public school in the depths of the Sussex countryside 1968 wasn’t quite as revolutionary as left bank Paris or as counter culture as liberation struggles in the USA. Admittedly I was eligible to be conscripted into China’s Red Army,, but that was the price I was expected to pay for my free copy of Chairman Mao’s little red book.
Our rebellious attitude was directed at the petty rules and restrictions of boarding school life. To find out what that was like, watch Lindsay Anderson’s brilliant film If.
Camus’upbringing couldn’t have been more different to my own. His father had been killed in WWI, he was raised by his mother in Algiers in a working class district along with his older brother, grandmother and paralyzed uncle. His primary school teacher, Louis Germain,recognised his talent and encouraged him to gain a scholarship to the lycee. Tuberculosis interrupted his university studies at the University of Algiers where he was studying Philosophy.
His writing earned him a Nobel Prize and he credited his old teacher, Louis Germain, in his acceptance speech.
His career as a journalist and author was cut short aged 49 in a car crash. His ideas on truth, justice, morality, humanitarianism and existentialism live on in his published works.
odespinner 