The recurrence of the pandemic is almost exhausting, and we know there are many things that can't go back.
Camus wrote in The Plague: "From this time on we can turn back, settle for our prisoner-like conditions of life, and plunge headlong into our past." ”
"Their courage, their will and their endurance will collapse, and they will feel that they will never be able to climb up again after falling into this deep hole." As a result, they are bound to force themselves, no longer face the future, and it can be said that they have been living with their eyes down. ”
The epidemic is like a plague, which makes no sense, but it has profoundly changed our lives and hearts. Camus presented different choices for different people in the face of disaster, which is still prescient to read.
Perhaps, human beings have some kind of eternal proposition that needs to be faced, how to dig out the part of the impermanent, meaningless, and even absurd life that is worth living?
There is no single answer, but Camus's attitude is, "Not to live the best, but to live the most."
Tell the | Yun also retreated, literary critic and book critic
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01.
Be alone
Albert Camus (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960), born in Mondovy, French Algeria, was a French novelist, philosopher, dramatist, and critic who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
Those scenes are about poverty, they're about being rich, they're about silence, they're about hustle and bustle. The poor are his home and the community in which he lives, while the rich are the boundless natural scenery and the old monuments left here by the ancient Greeks. The silence is the grandmother and the mother, and the hustle and bustle is the steaming city, where people are venting their love and feeling the vitality of the body.
Camus said that as long as you live like him in Algiers, North Africa, you will know how abundant the gifts of nature are, and that the beaches, the sea, and the palm trees there are not the best places to be exclusively occupied by a few rich people, as is the current resort, but nourish both glory and poverty without discrimination.
Here, whether you are the son of a high-ranking official or a penniless child of a poor family, white, black or black and white, as long as you are a young man, you will take off your bare stripes and go to receive free daylight and air. On the beach, there is also a dance hall, in Camus's memory, is a standard sea-view ballroom, where the children of the poor family can spend half a day until the lights come on.
Camus grew up mainly in the cities of Algiers and Oran in North Africa. In Algiers, his family's community is called Bellecour, where people are poor and ethnically complex. Although during the day he could admire the hustle and bustle of the seaside and the enchanting nature, at night he did not want to return to his apartment, but went to an empty Arabic café and sat for a long time.
When he went home to sleep, he could touch the darkness upstairs without turning on the light, a faint stench poured into his nose, and he raised each step high to avoid tripping, and his hands never dared to touch the railing, so as not to touch the passing cockroaches.
The direct experience of poverty is always with the beauty of the natural landscape and the naked flesh. There is another combination that Camus will never forget: that is, there is a cemetery facing the most beautiful scenery in Algiers. Camus felt a thick melancholy rise in the grave, where the flocks of birds inhabited were as dense as death.
On the tombstone there, Camus read the following epitaph: The flowers on your grave will never be lacking. Growing around the tombstone, however, is a plant called "Sage Grass," which, in French, is called immorteues, a word that means immortal. Even if the grass withers, it is as fresh and strange as it was when it was alive.
Camus, in the face of these ubiquitous unity of opposites, fell into contemplation. What was he thinking? Instead of thinking about why he was poor, or thinking about how to get out of this backcountry, he thought that it was not a providential arrangement to put himself in such a situation.
Providence had placed such a group of wild young men in this ruined French colony, of which he was a part; not only that, but he seemed to be favored by Providence, enlightened by it, and thus realized that there was something meaningful in the magic of scarcity and abundance.
He looked at the city, full of aura, and one day he saw a hearse driving out of a funeral parlor, and the driver shouted at the passing girl, "Hitchhiking, chick?" Camus did not think that the driver was too rude and funny, and what he thought of was that the connection between death and the vitality of life was not symbolized by such a picture?
He must believe that he is the one with the mission.
At night, behind him, in the corridor of the apartment, all kinds of garbage and food scraps rotted in the heat, and the stench passed by him, drifted out of the window, and drifted towards the silent starry sky that he was staring at. He is so sensitive to everything on earth, but he is alone in everything.
02.
Not to live the best, but to live the most
Later Camus grew up, and as a Frenchman born in the French colonies of North Africa, he went to Paris, which was like a kind of "homecoming", because the best intellectuals in France should be in Paris, Paris is the hub of Europe, it is at least a megaphone, which can expand the chirping of the sparrow into the cry of the phoenix.
There, Camus also gained friendship, some appreciated him, some people loved him deeply. He suffered from congenital tuberculosis, often felt tired and needed to recuperate, but his appearance was too in line with the perception of beautiful men in that era, and people would think of the big actor and tough guy superstar Humphrey Bogart at that time. Not to mention that he was truly talented, well-written and generous in his words.
Camus published his famous novel The Outsider in 1942, which wrote about the scene he was most familiar with: North Africa. There was blazing sunshine, sea water, desert and Arabs. But he wasn't peddling the exoticism of his hometown to Parisian readers. In that novel, North Africa witnesses an inexplicable murder, in which the protagonist of the novel, Meursault, is shot dead by an Arab who has no vendetta against him, and is subsequently arrested and tried.
In court, Meursault was alone, listening to the various analyses and accusations against him, saying that he was a very cold-blooded person in his daily life. He was put on death row and left alone in the long night waiting for the time of the shooting.
No matter how much Camus was flourishing and admired, and no matter how much applause and praise "The Outsider" attracted after its publication, Camus used Meursault, an almost lonely figure, to establish his own image, which is of course very cool. What was cool about him, however, was that the scenes of his hometown, which he had chewed on repeatedly, the beauty and the filth, the fullness and the lack, the death and the life, all faded far back in Meursault's story, becoming a vague, unrelated background board.
Is this because Camus lost interest in his hometown? Or was it because the temptation of success was there that prompted him to write about his hometown as a strange place, which aroused the curiosity of Parisians?
Neither. Camus could always go back to the moment when he wrote The Outsider, and when he was writing the Outsider, he could always return to the North African sun. In another book, The Myth of Sisyphus, he hinted at being an actor and letting all kinds of souls fight in his own flesh, because he did not seek to live the best, but to live the most. And a good actor can switch into another time and space as soon as he bows his head and raises his head. Every personal experience is an adjacent stage in his place, allowing him to go back and forth, and among the actors, who can compete with him for concentration?
He was always preoccupied with solving the mystery that had been buried in his heart long ago: What was the providence of the fact that I was left here?
In The Outsider, he begins to explore an extreme relationship between the landscape and the individual. He called it absurd. The landscape may be beautiful, but it becomes monotonous and indifferent because it does not respond to people's calls and struggles, and people may love scenery, but he is gradually reticent because he cannot communicate with the environment.
As a result, man shuts down his senses, retreats into inertia, and follows the daily rhythm of human society, living in a cycle. But if he keeps refusing to do so, he will try to penetrate deep into his existence in an attempt to give himself a response to the world that has never responded.
Meursault's continued efforts thus came to a critical moment. He exploded, shooting as a personal catharsis, but also a roar at the existence of man itself.
These secret pursuits are something that no one understands. On the other hand, what the world can understand is that debts are repaid, killing people to pay for their lives, and the attitude of the state prosecutor is to judge the good and evil of human nature according to his external behavior. This is a simple and arrogant approach, and in Camus's portrayal it adds fuel to the absurdity that already exists, and it further and further away from the search for the fundamental question of existence.
Camus believed that since he had realized this, he had an obligation to express it in the most ideal form and make it burn. So, just five years after the publication of The Outsider, he came up with a longer novel: The Plague.
03.
Always in a tight state
There's a guy in Plague, Tarou, who tells his friend Dr. Rieux that my father was a prosecutor.
Taru said he admired his father until he was 17 when he took him to observe a criminal trial. The father gushed about what kind of demon the defendant was and demanded that the court cut off his head, but Taru saw a flesh-and-blood man, the defendant standing in the dock like an owl illuminated by a strong light, his soul unincorporated, his bow tie crooked to the side, mechanically nibbling on the fingernails of one hand.
It was from that day that Taru could no longer face his father. He felt that his father had been involved in the murder; he also knew that there was no affection between his mother and father, and that poverty had made his mother accustomed to resignation. Tarou ran away from home and wandered around alone. He understood that no one in the world could understand his obsession, until he met the equally lonely Dr. Rieux, the two of them, who had taken on the responsibility of saving the city during a terrible plague.
That day, after they had finished their patrol, they sat side by side on a high platform overlooking a dark and dead city that even the Milky Way could not illuminate, and then they talked about friendship.
In The Outsider, Camus has already demonized North Africa once— a demonization that is, of course, in quotation marks; in Plague, he performs another horrific imagination of his beloved homeland. Camus was as familiar with the plague as he was with poverty in his childhood, and his own tuberculosis caused him to pay attention not only to healthy bodies, but also to great empathy for deformities, sickness, and doom.
Vitality and vitality have always watched death, just as the seas of North Africa have always watched the sun. Camus, who is struggling for meaning in the unity of opposites, then fiercely puts his heart on the opposite of the indifference between man and nature in "The Outsider" to the "Plague", the plague ruthlessly crushes people, which not only means taking away people's lives, but also stripping away the rich external colors of life, exposing the truth of living, in fact, it is just to spend day after day unchanged.
In the midst of the plague, cities are cut off from the outside world, governments are on the brink of paralysis, and ordinary people can do nothing but gather news, estimate prospects, and calculate the distance between doomsday and doomsday.
There is an old Spanish man with asthma in the story, and he has two pots in front of him, and he takes the chickpeas out of one pot, puts them into another, puts them in another, puts them in another, and then takes the beans back from that pot one by one and piles them up with the first pot. And so it goes. At any time, he took pleasure in it, but he seemed to be living and dying outside the degree. He never empathized with the lives and deaths of others, and his mantra was: Life, there will always be people who die.
The plague fell from the sky, it is unreasonable, and most of the people who have experienced the plague have learned nothingness, pessimism and timely pleasure, and their lives have become a bubble floating on the surface, which will shatter at any time.
But this time, we see something different. The protagonist is not a loner like Meursault, but two people: Tarrou, and Dr. Rieux, a moral idealist who believes that even if evil is insurmountable, the act of fighting evil itself has value, and Dr. Rieux is a silent actor, doing what should be done and doing his best.
They each sank into the question of human existence, and when others were at best sympathetic to the same disease, the painful questioning of these two people gave rise to a high-level friendship. They told each other where they came from and what they had learned from the plague.
Tarrou said he had always felt he had lost his moral innocence by following a prosecutor's father, so he would avoid committing another transgression for the rest of his life. He said that we are all plague sufferers, and the so-called good people are just more careful than others and will not spread the virus. But this requires a person to have a strong willpower, and it needs to be in a state of tension forever.
This idea is simply too noble. But camus did just that, and he was always taut, trying to make every sentence he spoke and wrote refined and unconventional. When he pointed out the existence of absurdity, he did not let people stop their opposition to absurdity. So "The Plague" seems cooler than "The Outsider", because unlike the lone murderer Meursault, Tarou is obviously a warrior and a righteous man, and one of the victims of the plague, but generously admits that he is guilty.
04.
Use communication to express silence
Camus's books can make people live with a kind of nobility, and people will believe that noble personality really exists, and it is not difficult to reach. However, the pursuit of nobility and perfection also has another meaning. When Camus attracts readers with his precise words, poetic expressions, and moral accomplishment that is higher than the average person, he also feels a real loneliness.
Because in many things, the lofty moral realm has no place. Camus wrote the right thing in the 1940s, the French and Europeans remember World War II vividly, and the Cold War pattern had not yet come into being, but a decade later, things changed. Fame brought Camus consequences that he could not predict: he had to descend from the moral cloud, talk about politics, and become a good opinion leader. In particular, he had to talk more and more about his hometown.
His homeland of North Africa, Algeria, was meant to serve only as a backdrop for his novels, to add evidence to his ideas about the absurd world; now Algeria is to break away from France and become an independent country. Camus had relatives and friends there, but he himself was French, and he could not be fully loyal to either side, and all he could do was to condemn the violence in time in the event of riots in the colonies.
His desperate campaign between the two sides, promoting reconciliation, truly tempered him into a grounded humanitarian. In 1957, the Nobel Prize in Literature, perhaps the most exciting of all the awards in a hundred and twenty years, said that the prize was awarded to Camus because "his serious and stern contemplation sought to rebuild what had been destroyed and to make justice possible in a world without justice." ”
However, Camus, who went to Sweden to receive the award, was extremely frightened in his heart, because he knew that receiving the award was not a literary moment, but a political moment, and many media and audiences would come to listen to him express his political position.
His fears were not pretentious. After The Plague, he had not published a novel for a full decade, yet he had always been a moral role model in what people called him, a trustworthy conscience of the times. They placed too many expectations on him that had nothing to do with literature and art.
In Stockholm in December 1957, a newspaper sent Camus the last thing he wanted to answer: Everyone knows that you are the conscience of the times, but why have you not taken a stand on the Algerian issue? During Camus's speech, a Muslim student stood up and said: You often condemn the atrocities that took place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but why don't you condemn the algerians, where Arabs are being killed, don't you know?
We don't have to care about Camus's answer. Whatever he answered, as long as he tried to be fair, emphasizing that the interests of Algerians and French were equally important, he would be hated by people on both ends, and the battle-hardened political observers would scoff at Camus's literary style.
In the final analysis, is thinking about the absurd, thinking about the dilemma of man's existence, a job that most people's minds can do? Aren't they really the brainstorming of an ambitious young man who deliberately squeezes meaning out of his life?
Camus's last choice was to get rid of all these distractions and disappear completely from public opinion. He paid the price of his reputation for it. He was forgotten for a long time, and the handsomeness of his early years gradually dissipated into a desolation.
Camus did not need communication in order to break the silence, but used communication to express silence.
*This article is excerpted from the ideal App program "Writer's Tavern", the content has been deleted and adjusted, and the subtitle has been added by the editor. For full views and narration, please move to the relevant program to listen.