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MATHA: What's the autumn?

JAN: A second spring when every leaf's a flower."

---- Albert Camus, The Misunderstanding (1944)

MARTHA : Qu'est-ce que l'automne ?

JAN : Un deuxième printemps, où toutes les feuilles sont comme des fleurs".

---- Albert Camus, Le Malentendu (1944)

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When will you understand that my happiness can only be born from yours? When will you understand my love? When?

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, March 2, 1950 [#230]  

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“I dream, often. Mostly I dream of you near me, and of a time when we will no longer have to speak of this love. Yes, I would like to stop talking about it and let it become so much a part of our lives, so much a part of our breaths… to love as we breathe, that’s it.”

— Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, December 31, 1948 [#49] (via acknowledgetheabsurd)

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“‘The Gods,” Albert Camus writes, “had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Your New Year’s resolution, which begins today, is your rock. Every day you will push it up the hill, only to watch it roll back down again. Some day soon, maybe a week from now or in mid-February, you will lace your sneakers for that new 2-mile daily run and your mind will go to work on you. “Why am I doing this? It’s cold out, and I hate running. My energy level hasn’t increased, and I haven’t lost a pound. It’s making me miserable, and I don’t want to do it anymore.” And you won’t. You will abandon your rock and rejoice at being free of the weight. But the feeling won’t last because, as Camus says, “one always finds one’s burden again.” You will make other resolutions, on arbitrary dates throughout the year, in the never-ending pursuit of a better version of yourself. You will envision a thinner you, and the diet will begin. You will wake one morning with an indescribable emptiness and decide that a new hobby will fill the void. You will act unkindly toward someone you care about, and vow then and there to become a better person. That is the absurdity of the human condition and the dark side of hope: Every breath is expelled in the pursuit of an imagined future. “I hope that denying myself chocolate makes me thinner, because then I will finally approve of me.” “I hope painting becomes my passion, because then I will be fulfilled.” “I hope that by doing good deeds, my life will have value.” For their punishment to constitute torture, the Gods rely on the same kind of hope: “If I can just get this rock to the top of the mountain,” they want Sisyphus to whisper to himself, “then everything will be better.” Disappointment, they know, is inherent in the wish. But the Gods underestimate him. Even amid this eternal and futile labor, Sisyphus finds joy in his burden, his fate. He becomes the “master of his days.” “The struggle itself toward the heights,” Camus writes of Sisyphus, “is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Torture isn’t pushing the rock, it’s pushing the rock toward a destination. So run not to be a runner, but to feel the cold air in your lungs and hear the whooshing sound of the world as you move through it. Paint not to be a painter, but because you love how the brush feels in your hand as it streaks color across a once-blank canvas. Be kind not to be a better person, but because it feels unnatural to be otherwise. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus says, and it’s sacred advice. To find joy in the doing is the best way to exist in the world. It is the secret to life and resolutions.”

— ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ and Resolutions [x]

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4th January 1960 - Death Of Philosopher Albert Camus

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My dearest love, the day began magnificently: a flood of sunshine inundating my bed and, behind the windows, the soft hum of the beautiful days. I thought of the letter from you that I was sure to receive since yesterday I had not received anything. I read a little piece of Apollonius and Bellarmine by Pérez de Ayala, which I found delightful. And then I got up, washed, and worked in a solitary house, since everyone else was in Cannes. At noon, I went out. Cabris on its hillock, a little below, was surrounded by trees in bloom. And everywhere, thousands of buds. Each bud brought me closer to you. 

The letter carrier was late, but I was full of immense love and total trust. And, indeed, your letter was there. It was just as I had hoped for, alive, loving, young again. Don't be afraid, my great, my beautiful, I am not going away or leaving you, and for the now measurable time I am away from you, I keep you close to me, in the heart of the days, with love and greed. I am determined today to forgive you everything, even your stammering in The Righteous. Don't think about it, it's not important. For your friends from Clermont-Ferrand, I will allow them to play if you know them and if they are not fools. I systematically refuse to authorize troops that I don't know - I don't want to be ridiculed. Besides, if it's going to feed you chocolate! 

I’ll write to the Society of Authors to say that they are allowed. Too bad for the audience in Clermont-Ferrand. Yes, you're right, words have no meaning anymore and it's time to hold each other. But from now on, it will be quick. This sky is already almost summer's sky. In my room, a bumblebee hums and bumps against the windows. The sea in the distance is pale with heat. I think of the sunny afternoons in the room in Ermenonville. Will you go back there, my dear? Yes, won't you? It will be springtime there... 

My dearest love, I'm going down to Grasse to see my doctor. He will tell me nothing but nice things, surely. I look like a king. I'll write you as soon as he tells me. But I don't want to leave you without telling you again everything that is in my heart, the love that fills me, the sweet concern I have for you, the gratitude too. Take care of yourself, live again, also think of being beautiful. I love you, my generous one! I am waiting for you, and I put in this letter all the blue sky that surrounds me, all the light so that you find strength and courage in it. I kiss you with all my might.

Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, March 3, 1950 [#229]

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Doctor Rieux thus resolved to compile this chronicle which you find before you in order not to number among those who keep quiet, in order to bear witness in favor of those who suffer the plague, in order that some memorial would exist of the injustice and the violence which had been inflicted upon them. He wanted quite simply to record what one learns in the midst of the pestilence, namely that there are more things to admire about human beings than to despise. . . He knew what this happy crowd did not know, but what it could have learned from books: the plague baccilus never dies nor disappears for good, that it may rest dormant for dozens of years in furniture, in furnishings, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day will come when to the misfortune or enlightenment of humanity, the plague will again bestir its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city.

[L]e docteur Rieux décida alors de rédiger le récit qui s’achève ici, pour ne pas être de ceux quise taisent, pour témoigner en faveur de ces pestiférés, pour laisser de moins un souvenir de l’injustice et de la violence qui leur avaient été faites, et pour dire simplement ce qu’on apprend au milieu des fléaux, qu’il y a dans les homes plus de choses à admirer que de choses à mépriser. . . [I]l savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacilli de la peste ne meurt ni disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambers, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le Malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse.

—Albert Camus, La peste, bk v (1947) in Albert Camus Théâtre, Récits et Nouvelles (Pléiade ed. 1967), pp. 1473-74. As Albert Camus reminds us, we delude ourselves by thinking that the baccilus of fascism is gone. It lies dormant to be revived again, as we witnessed on Nov 5

[Robert Scott Horton]

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I don't want to leave you without telling you again everything that is in my heart, the love that fills me, the sweet concern I have for you, the gratitude too. Take care of yourself, live again, also think of being beautiful. I love you, my generous one! I am waiting for you, and I put in this letter all the blue sky that surrounds me, all the light so that you find strength and courage in it. I kiss you with all my might.

Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, March 3, 1950 [#229]  

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The Plague by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics, 1978 edition).

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Cabris on its hillock, a little below, was surrounded by trees in bloom. And everywhere, thousands of buds. Each bud brought me closer to you.

Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, March 3, 1950 [#229]

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Albert Camus, from Caligula & Other Plays; "State of Siege: A Play in Three Parts,"

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My dear love, I can see that the sun, the real sun, has not yet returned to Cabris. Ah! How he makes himself wait! When I receive one of your letters like the most recent one, I realize how helpless I am when I am away from you. What can I do to bring you life, joy, a certain peace, a taste of the good times? What can I do, if not run towards you, abandon everything, turn everything upside down, and try, in your arms to make you smile like you know how do when your heart is delighted? You know? 

I really need to lecture myself to stay there, wise, and wait. Ah, my darling, shake yourself up. I understand that sometimes, and even often, not to say always, you feel your heart in a vice. I know that he is good, that it is so and that you must have the courage to look well, to know well the vice and not to forget it; but I am very much afraid that there is a kind of lucidity that delights in fixation and thus ends up not being clear-sighted. I am expressing myself badly, but I hope you can hear me. Are you not forgetting the real life? Or, to say it better, an essential part of your life and of yourself? 

Ah! I’m worried. At first, I was wondering if this state where you found yourself was no more conducive than another creation, but I see that's not the case and this does not surprise me. That's why I didn't tell you about it earlier. What to do? Ah! Misery. I try to console myself by telling myself that your return to Paris will perhaps fix all this a little, but if I think about it, I don't see how or why you would change for the better in a city that sucks the life forces out of your body and heart. Finally, I'll be there, close to you and maybe I'll be able to give you back the taste you've lost; but I doubt it. 

Today I rehearsed in the morning, and the rest of the day I spent, alone, at home reading, writing, tinkering, daydreaming. This made me feel a bit blue towards the evening that I hastened to pour out on stage through Dora. But I came back tired and if it wasn't for my discomfort to go to bed without you, I would have fallen asleep right away. Then... I don't know what to tell you. From your letters, I can't imagine your state and put you back together and I have the awful impression that I don't know who I'm talking to. 

Ah! quickly the end of March! Quickly your eyes, your arms, your hands, your warmth! I am beginning to hate paper and pens. Darling, my love, love me, do not leave me, do not go away. It is awful. I've been lonely for two or three days. Come back to me. Warm me up. Keep me against you until you come back. Ah, what torture. I love you. I wait for you. I beg you, love me.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, March 2, 1950 [#227]

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I knew a man who gave a twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that's all, bored like the most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Albert Camus ☆– The Fall

[photo: Albert Camus with his wife Francine Faure; Uppsala | January 1958]

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Quickly the end of March! Quickly your eyes, your arms, your hands, your warmth! I am beginning to hate paper and pens. Darling, my love, love me, do not leave me, do not go away. It is awful. I've been lonely for two or three days. Come back to me. Warm me up. Keep me against you until you come back. Ah, what torture. I love you. I wait for you. I beg you, love me.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, March 2, 1950 [#227]

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Rehearsal at the Angers festival. Albert Camus sitting in front of the stage. 1953.

Photo by Emile Muller

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When I receive one of your letters like the most recent one, I realize how helpless I am when I am away from you. What can I do to bring you life, joy, a certain peace, a taste of the good times? What can I do, if not run towards you, abandon everything, turn everything upside down, and try, in your arms to make you smile like you know how do when your heart is delighted?

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, March 2, 1950 [#227]

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“A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it”

Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus