Camus. l'absurde and a very large building in Dubai

Well it looks like they were only on the edge of "Ike" if reports of the devastation caused in Galveston and then Houston are correct. We get used to the wind down here but then we don't live in houses so, in one way, we're luckier, no flying glass! We just have to stick together! Low centre of gravity! And sheer weight of numbers!

So perhaps immediate worries subside, as Alexander once pointed out:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest

Perhaps if Pope had visited here he would have included penguins too. Tho' it wouldn't have scanned! You'd have thought he could have spelled 'blessed' correctly though:-)

So, Albert Camus, l'absurde and hope. Well, I did say........Now Camus often gets lumped in with Sartre as an existentialist but I think that's because he's French, well Algerian French, and they wrote about the same time. But he's not! Satre is about choice and the responsibility that goes with it. How you create a moral code in the absence of God. Where a code can come from if it's not handed down from 'on high'. I think Sartre does really well on that front! What Camus provides is the other crutch. The hope!

You see, if life is just life, where do you get the hope from to stop despairing of it all? Well for Camus, the defining metaphor is Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was a king in Corinth, who amongst his many indiscretions, locked Hades, King of the Underworld, in a cupboard. Finally called to book, his sentence was to be doomed for all eternity to roll a huge boulder up a hill only to lose his grip almost at the very top and for the boulder to roll all the way back down again! Now it seems quite clear that whoever 'invented' this myth was almost certainly trying to get across an idea of futility. Sisyphus' punishment is the despair he must feel each time he nears the top, knowing the rock will slip from his grasp and roll back down. He can never 'complete' the task. There never will be an achievement, never a completion. Most people would probably concur. After a few years, you'd be in anguish, wouldn't you?

And yet, in this tale of misery and 'despair', Camus found 'hope'! Of the most profound kind. "Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux." "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

For Camus, facing 'l'absurde', the absurd, all that life can throw at you, confronting those things that make life what it is, being, if you like 'at one with life' made all of the 'minor tribulations' such as rock rolling of no purpose, irrelevant. Life itself gave life meaning. No 'saute metaphysique' was required. All that was required was to recognise 'l'absurde', confront it when you must, but otherwise to celebrate and enjoy the life you have. For the goalkeeper of the Oran football team, I think that's a pretty good job! It certainly sustains me when I have my doubts about God's non existence. I imagine how I would feel in the rock rolling team!

Not much around the point but do you ever wonder if you're on the same planet as every one else? Talking of blog comments earlier, reminded me of a not particular nice one earlier in the series. Now I knew who'd posted it and I posted a spoof answer for which I got 'vilified' in the next comment! Now my post contained a reference to something which few people or penguins know about so I thought it ought to be obvious who wrote the comment. But no! They thought it was genuine! Ah well, you can be too clever for your own good some time!