When our response to the killing or torturing of a fellow human being is anything other than horror and outrage; when we consider the deliberate infliction of pain as no more disturbing than standing in line for our daily food rations; when we have reached this point, we must accept that the world will not improve simply because Hitler is gone. Scanning the hall, Camus declared: “We are all of us responsible and we are duty-bound to seek the causes of the terrifying evil that still gnaws at the soul of Europe.”
This was not all that Camus now grasped. Absurdity, he saw, “teaches nothing.” Instead of taking this diagnosis as a fatality — instead of looking only at ourselves, as do Sisyphus or Meursault — we must look to others. We are, in the end, condemned to live together in a precarious, unsettling world. “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love,” he wrote in the journal. “Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.” Love saves us from absurdity.
What we fought for, Camus concluded, “was something common not just to us, but to all human beings. Namely, that man still had meaning.”
We need, he declared, “to call things by their proper names and understand that we murder millions of human beings when we allow us to think certain thoughts.”
I have always liked Camus. That is all I will say.
What he called the absurd, I call madness. But madness is not an ontological condition.
Ok. that is all I will say. Until I do.