03/11/2025
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“That's the paradox Camus embodied: life is absurd and meaningless, but that's exactly why love, beauty, and justice matter. Precisely because the universe doesn't care, we must care. Precisely because nothing means anything, everything we choose to value becomes precious.
He once wrote: "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." Albert Camus understood darkness better than most. And he still chose light.
He didn't believe in cosmic justice or divine plans or inevitable progress. He believed in people deciding to be decent to each other despite the overwhelming evidence that nothing matters.”
He wrote that life is meaningless—then won the Nobel Prize and died three years later with an unused train ticket in his pocket.
January 4, 1960. Albert Camus was riding in his publisher's fancy Facel Vega sports car, heading back to Paris after the holidays. In his briefcase was an unused train ticket—he had planned to take the train but accepted a ride at the last moment.
The car hit a tree at high speed. Camus died instantly. He was 46 years old.
The unused ticket became a symbol of the absurdity he'd spent his life writing about: the universe's complete indifference to our plans, our intentions, our very existence.
But before that moment, Camus had lived a life that proved his philosophy: when faced with a meaningless universe, we must create meaning through how we choose to live.
He was born in 1913 in Algeria, so poor that his family couldn't afford to bury his father properly. Lucien Camus had died at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, when Albert was barely a year old. His mother, Catherine, was partially deaf and couldn't read. She cleaned houses to keep them alive.
Albert grew up in a two-room apartment in Belcourt, Algiers' working-class neighborhood, sharing space with his mother, grandmother, and two uncles. He had nothing—except a mind that wouldn't stop asking questions.
A teacher recognized his intelligence and helped him get a scholarship. By his twenties, Camus was studying philosophy at the University of Algiers, reading Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, playing goalkeeper for the local football team, and developing tuberculosis that would haunt him for life.
That's when he began writing about "the absurd."
The absurd, for Camus, wasn't just philosophical theory. It was lived experience: watching your father die for a war that meant nothing, growing up in poverty while colonizers lived in luxury, contracting a disease that could kill you at any moment for no reason at all.
The absurd is the collision between our desperate human need for meaning and the universe's silent refusal to provide any.
Most people, faced with this realization, either commit su***de or invent comforting lies (religion, ideology, distraction). Camus proposed a third option: embrace the absurdity, and live anyway. Live fully, passionately, rebelliously—not because it matters in some cosmic sense, but because you choose to make it matter.
In 1942, he published The Stranger, a novel about a man so detached from conventional meaning that he doesn't cry at his mother's funeral and later shoots someone almost by accident. The protagonist, Meursault, is condemned not for murder but for failing to perform the expected emotions. Society can't tolerate someone who sees through its pretenses.
The novel was published during N**i occupation. Camus was working in Paris, separated from his wife Francine and their twin children, Catherine and Jean, who were stuck in Algeria. He couldn't get back to them because of the war.
So he joined the Resistance.
He became an editor for Combat, an underground newspaper that published anti-N**i material at enormous risk. If caught, he would have been executed. But Camus believed that even in an absurd universe, some things demand action. Fascism wasn't just philosophically wrong—it was a betrayal of human dignity.
After liberation, Combat became a legitimate newspaper, and Camus one of France's most prominent intellectuals. He was friends with Jean-Paul Sartre, fellow existentialist and Paris café philosopher.
Then they had one of the most famous intellectual breakups in history.
In 1951, Camus published The Rebel, arguing that revolutionary violence—even when justified by noble goals—always betrays its own principles. Killing people to create a better world just creates more killing. Sartre, increasingly aligned with Marxism and Soviet communism, saw this as naive and politically irresponsible.
Their friendship exploded in vicious public essays. Sartre called Camus bourgeois and philosophical lightweight. Camus accused Sartre of justifying Stalin's gulags. They never spoke again.
Meanwhile, Algeria was burning. The independence movement had turned violent, with atrocities on both sides. Camus, an pied-noir (French Algerian), was torn. He opposed colonialism but couldn't support the killing of civilians—including his own mother, still living in Algiers.
When asked to choose between justice and his mother, he said: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice."
It was an honest, painful admission that moral purity is often impossible when real people you love are at stake.
In 1957, at 44, Camus became one of the youngest Nobel Prize laureates in literature. The Swedish Academy praised his work for "illuminating the problems of the human conscience in our times."
He was uncomfortable with the honor. He felt other writers deserved it more. He knew his health was failing, his marriage was troubled, and his beloved Algeria was tearing itself apart in a war he couldn't solve.
Three years later, he was dead.
They found the manuscript of an unfinished novel in the wreckage—The First Man, an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria. It was published posthumously in 1994 and revealed a tenderness absent from his philosophical works: a son trying to understand his silent mother, a poor boy grateful for sunlight and the sea.
His daughter Catherine later said her father was happiest playing with his children, swimming, smoking ci******es on the beach. The philosopher of the absurd found meaning in small, ordinary moments.
That's the paradox Camus embodied: life is absurd and meaningless, but that's exactly why love, beauty, and justice matter. Precisely because the universe doesn't care, we must care. Precisely because nothing means anything, everything we choose to value becomes precious.
He once wrote: "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."
Albert Camus understood darkness better than most. And he still chose light.
He didn't believe in cosmic justice or divine plans or inevitable progress. He believed in people deciding to be decent to each other despite the overwhelming evidence that nothing matters.
The unused train ticket tells you everything: life is random, death is arbitrary, and all our careful plans are vulnerable to chance.
But how you live between birth and death? That's the only thing you control.
And Camus lived fighting fascism, writing truths that made people uncomfortable, loving his children, defending his mother, and insisting—against all philosophical evidence—that human dignity is worth defending.
He died suddenly, meaninglessly, absurdly.
But he had lived deliberately. And that, according to his own philosophy, was the whole point.
{PS}
