Happy Birthday, Albert Camus! 100 years old today…a centenarian. I memorized this phrase from The Plague, 1947, years ago for some reason, (its tautological veracity, I suppose): “There is a terrible cogency in the self-evident”, and well there is, isn’t there? You can read the book free online here! Given its meditations on mortality and death, its somehow fitting to think of it on such an auspicious birthday, especially as its now alleged that he died at the hands of the KGB, and not a car accident…
When I first read it, I was dating this guy (brother of a great Hollywood actress who was also quite overbearing). He also happened to ABD in french lit, and OCD in temperament, and he couldn’t get over the fact that I was reading Camus. (In English, of course, dumb American that I am). As if it were really outre. It prompted me to read more, of course, but this book, and that line, have always stuck with me. I encourage you to read it, its quite short though not a quick read, which you know if you’ve read his work. I might re-read it again…might be interesting alongside The Palace of the White Skunks, 1972, by Reinaldo Arenas, which I’m reading now and LOVING. They both entangle you a lot of atmospheric non-sequiter surreality, but the essential human tragedy that undergirds the nonsense is classic expressionism. Philosophical, too. Both live in “the impossible”. Makes me think of all the Richard Foreman plays I saw at St. Mark’s Church back in the day, never missing one of those Hysteric-Ontological Theater productions for years when I lived in lower Manhattan. I always sat in the second row, though, just above the plexiglass partition that protected those in the first row from whatever might fly or spill over from the stage. Always bits of ponderous brilliance that came at me, buried in the absurdist antics. I should go back and see something again.
