Reading Notebooks 1951-1959 of Albert Camus, I cannot help but love and sympathize with this sensitive, self-doubting, and tortured soul.
Stages of healing.
Letting volition sleep. Enough of 'you must.'
Completely depoliticize the mind in order to humanize it.
Write the claustrophobic -- and comedies.
Deal with death, which is to say, accept it.
Accept making a spectacle of yourself. I will not die of this anguish. If I died from it, the end. Otherwise, at worst, shortsighted behavior. It suffices to accept others' judgment. Humility and acceptance: purely medical remedies of anguish. (p. 203)
Like his hero Nietzsche, Camus had the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus but the bladed intellect of the skeptic: he could not bring himself to believe. Trust in the ultimate sense of things was impossible for this argonaut of the Absurd, as was hope. Thus humility and acceptance could only be for him "purely medical remedies."
And how could he completely depoliticize his mind when the only world for him was this miserably political one? If this is all there is, then all of one's hopes and dreams and aspirations for peace and justice have to be trained upon it and its future. There you have the futile delusion of the 'progressive.' Rejecting God, he puts his faith in Man, when it ought to be evident that Man does not exist, only men, at each others' throats, full of ignorance and corruption, incapable of redeeming themselves.
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