| Fragments from COMBAT and THE REBEL | ||
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ALBERT CAMUS BETWEEN HELL AND REASON: Writings from COMBAT, the WWII French Resistance Newspaper The seventeenth century was the century of mathematics, the eighteenth that of the physical sciences, and the nineteenth that of biology. Our twentieth century is the century of fear. I will be told that fear is not a science. But science is no doubt involved, for its latest advances have brought it to the point of negating itself, while its perfected technology threatens the entire world with destruction. Moreover, if fear itself cannot be considered a science, it is certainly a technique. (The Century of Fear) Heroism isn’t much…happiness is more difficult (Letters to a German Friend) Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments: a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason. (On the bombing of Hiroshima) What is an insurrection? It is the people in arms. Who are the people? They are those in a nation who will never be made to kneel. Revolution is no revolt. What carried the Resistance for four years was revolt: the complete, obstinate, and at first nearly blind refusal to accept an order that would bring men to their knees. Revolt begins first in the human heart. But there comes a time when revolt spreads from heart to spirit, when a feeling becomes an idea, when impulse leads to concerted action. This is the moment of revolution. We have no perverse test for this world of violence and noise, where the best of us waste ourselves in desperate struggle. Yet we have committed ourselves to this struggle: we will see it through to the end. We want no part of an order that would consecrate our resignation and the end of human hope. That is why, deeply committed though we care to help found an order that is finally just, it must be known, too, that we are determined to reject forever the famous phrase of a false prophet and to declare that, for all eternity, we prefer disorder to injustice. (On social order) The world is what it is, which is to say, nothing much. (On the bombing of Hiroshima) What with the general fear of a war for which all the world is now preparing, and the specific fear of murderous ideologies, it is really true that we all live in terror. We live in terror because dialogue is no longer possible, because man has surrendered entirely to history, because he can no longer find that part of himself, very bit as real as history, that sees beauty in the world and in human faces. We live in a world of abstractions, bureaucracies and machines, absolute ideas, and crude messianism. We suffocate among people who think they are right in their machines as well as in their ideas. For those who can live only with dialogue, only with the friendship of men, this silence means the end of the world. (The century of fear) In any case, I shall reply once more and finally to the accusations of utopia. For us the choice is simple: utopia or a war that has been prepared for by outdated modes of thought. The world must choose today between either antiquated political thought or utopian thought. Antiquated thought is killing us. As skeptical as we are (myself included), realism forces us to choose this relative utopia. Once our utopia has become a part of history, then, as with so many other utopias of its kind, men will not be able to conceive of reality without it. For history is nothing but the desperate efforts of men to give truth to their most clairvoyant dreams. (The world goes fast) THE REBEL Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular. P14 |
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