Incredibly rich but also dense. Reading this gave a lot more color to “The Stranger” — I had picked it up looking for a conclusion about the ending of his novel, for some hard philosophical scaffolding but instead came away even more confused. But I think that might be the entire point?? That there is no such thing as concluding or knowing, that there is just repeatedly trying in a life that is absurd? The first half of the book was spent defining the precipice of the absurd, the balance point between the desire for meaning on this earth, what Camus calls “nostalgia”, and a world that is fundamentally empty of meaning. He alludes to many other philosophers as negation, whose beliefs are existential rather than absurd because they transcend the need for meaning or nostalgia through philosophical suicide (religion, love, pure intellectualism).

The section of applied examples I found most confusing — the actor, Don Juan, the conqueror, who I believe is Napoleon? Didn’t successfully follow the quantity > quality argument of absurdism that much, I think it has something to do with squeezing as much as possible out of life before death comes, at any point, but I don’t know if I personally would adopt this philosophy. Is being absurd hating death? Knowing it’s coming and inevitable and actively despising it? Still have a lot of questions here and feel this is one I could come back to repeatedly as I read more of the core texts (Kafka, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky).

I really enjoyed the meta-section on art under absurdism, the act of repeated creation and how an oeuvre builds across a lifetime of work. It’s a much more earnest and generous definition of art than the one-strike masterpiece. The novelist / artist vs the philosopher, the cheapness of ideas. I also thought the closing chapter about Sisyphus was deeply, deeply beautifully written. The way Camus writes about Kafka makes me want to read more of the both of them. Hard work to get through this but very well worth it and I’m exciting to make it through the “bibliography” of works involved in its building.