Albert Camus

Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, in French Algeria. His father was killed on the Marne the next year, when the boy was not yet one, and he was raised in a cramped two-room flat in a working-class quarter of Algiers by a deaf, nearly mute mother who cleaned other people's houses and an illiterate grandmother. No books, no electricity. A teacher, Louis Germain, saw the gift and pushed him toward the lycée; forty-odd years later, receiving the Nobel Prize, Camus dedicated it to that teacher. As a boy he kept goal for his university football team and said afterward that he had learned all his morality on the pitch, because the ball never comes where you expect. At seventeen tuberculosis took the sport from him and shadowed the rest of his life. And the sun and sea of Algeria stayed the sensuous ground of everything he wrote.

He put his one serious question plainly: given that life has no meaning built into it, why not take your own life? The answer is the absurd. The absurd is born from the collision between our hunger for meaning and the silence of a universe that will not supply it. You cannot dissolve the collision, but you can live inside it – lucidly and in revolt, refusing both suicide and the false comforts of religion and ideology. He unfolded all of this across three books of the absurd in 1942: the novel The Stranger, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and the play Caligula. Sisyphus, condemned to roll his stone up the hill forever, becomes the image of the human condition; the whole dignity is in the rolling, and Sisyphus, Camus says, must be imagined happy.

Through the Occupation, Camus edited the underground Resistance paper Combat in Paris and wrote its editorials at the risk of his life. After the war he was the conscience of the French left – until the break that cost him everything. In The Rebel, in 1951, he refused to excuse the Soviet camps as "historical necessity"; Sartre's circle fell on him, the old friendship snapped, and Camus was left in an isolation he never fully climbed out of. He was a man of the left who would not lie about the Gulag. He held to the same plainness over Algeria: when an Algerian student in Stockholm reproached him for his silence, Camus answered that bombs were being planted in the tramways of Algiers, that his own mother might be riding in one, and that if that is what justice means, then he would take his mother. He would not trade a living person beside him for any abstract principle.

Camus walked in circles around Christianity all his life – an unbeliever who never stopped treating it with respect. His student thesis was on the meeting of Hellenism and Christianity, read through Plotinus and Augustine, two of his fellow North Africans. In 1948, speaking to the Dominicans in their monastery, he said it plainly: I do not share your hope and I will not pretend to, but the world needs Christians who will stay Christian and call evil by its name aloud, and against the cruelty of the age I will stand at your side. He honoured the person of Christ and the moral seriousness of faith, and took none of its consolation. It is the honest distance of an outsider circling the threshold: do not baptise him after the fact, and do not wave him away.

In 1957, at forty-four, Camus became one of the youngest ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Just over two years later, on 4 January 1960, he was killed instantly when the car his publisher was driving struck a plane tree beside a straight, empty road near Villeblevin. In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket: he had meant to travel by rail and changed his mind at the last moment. The Myth of Sisyphus had opened by calling the absurd the one truly serious philosophical problem; his own death was the absurd itself, a lone tree on a clear road. He was buried at Lourmarin, in the Provençal light he loved. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.