Finite Transcendence by Burr Steven A

Author:Burr, Steven A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

After several days’ exile in this foreign city, Camus finally left for ‘safer’ and more familiar territory in Italy, “a land that fits my soul, whose signs I recognize one by one as I approach” (48). Yet despite this familiarity with and appreciation for his new destination, Camus’ sense of disconnection, even not belonging, persisted; once in Vicenza, he recognized that still he stood separate from the world within which he found himself and lamented the “confrontation between [his own] deep despair and the secret indifference of one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world” (50). Camus’ wonder at his surroundings in Vicenza fostered a sense of awe at the beauty of the world that crushed the specific loneliness and emptiness he had felt in Prague, while at the same time adding to his feelings of despair at his inability to create a sense of connection between himself and that world. In “Love of Life,” Camus further emphasizes the beauty of the world around him and the surging sense of life it inspires within him, while maintaining the realization that the awe which wells up inside him takes him no closer to clarity, understanding, or connection: “If the language of these countries harmonized with what echoed within me, it was not because it answered my questions but because it made them superfluous.”[9] As the beauty of the world around him intensified, Camus’ own anguish became more acute, as the silence and indifference of that beautiful world rendered hopeless his quest for understanding of the world and his connection to it.

In the essays that make up The Wrong Side and the Right Side and Nuptials, Camus conveys not only his intense desire to attain a level of understanding of and a connection with his world but also the absence of any inherent certainty of attaining either. Camus’ personal encounter with life leads him to a specific sensation and a distinct realization regarding life, as this encounter becomes an engagement with the absurdity of existence. These early essays, in conjunction with Camus’ personal notebooks, can be understood as an essential preface to much of his later work. As Camus examines his own individual encounter with existence, he ultimately arrives at a realization of the absurdity of that existence, which in turn lays the groundwork for his more formal examination of the absurdity of existence in general as it is undertaken in The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, and beyond. Similarly, the basic response which Camus prescribes for any individual to the eventual realization of the absurdity of existence follows clearly from his own personal experience, in that it is the response which he chose for himself to counter his own recognition of that same absurdity.

Camus’ immediate and direct realization of the absurd, as he recounted in his Notebooks, arose from an acute acknowledgment of the absence of ‘home’: “My home is neither here nor elsewhere. And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing.”[10]

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