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.
