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51 — Sisyphus
100 Sonnets — Sonnet 51: A Crash Course on Absurdism Set to Yakety Sax
So… let’s talk about Camus.
My mother is of the opinion that there is no such thing as “age-appropriate reading,” and of her many strong opinions on childrearing, this is one I agree with. My experience has been that I’ve only benefited from being given books to read that were beyond my ability to understand fully; I grasped more than you’d think, and I got to reread those books as I got older, understanding more deeply each time. So I’m not MAD that my mother gave me existential philosophy books when I was seven years old, exactly… but it did absolutely warp my brain for life.
I started with Sophie’s World, which I highly recommend; it’s a very accessible runthrough of the major beats in the history of philosophy, in the form of a charmingly uninhibited meta-textual joke. I had a brief period where I flirted with girls by reading them Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, which worked out exactly as badly as you’re imagining. (Turns out if you want to seduce girls by reading aloud, you want the Hitchhiker’s Guide.) After that, I moved on to Alfred Jarry, during which time I was very fun to be around, and then to Camus, during which time I became totally impossible to be around.
Camus is an absurdist, and he made me one. I talk around my peculiar worldview a lot here, so I’m going to try to explain it head-on for once, as clearly and concisely as I can. I’m certainly mangling the pertinent philosophy, don’t @ me; this is my version of absurdism, informed by a lot of much smarter people and over-salted by me.
Absurdism is a permutation of existentialism. Existentialism centers around the idea that existence has no inherent meaning, and that creating meaning is the work of consciousness. There are various ways you can react to the lack of meaning, and those reactions describe the different permutations of existentialism. An existentialist starts with, “there is no meaning” and concludes, “therefore, I must spend my life searching for or creating meaning.” A nihilist starts with, “there is no meaning” and concludes, “therefore, to search for meaning or create it is foolish and pointless.” And an absurdist starts with, “there is no meaning,” and concludes, “therefore, to search for meaning…
