It can be difficult to approach a book as it was intended to be read and not drag with us all our “modern sensibilities.” We are probably doomed to experience everything through the lens of our current beliefs, like it or not. This results in criticizing what went before as if the author or the artist or the sculptor “should have known better.” Statues get torn down, books get banned, art gets condemned. “So it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut famously said.

I just finished rereading The Stranger, by Albert Camus, a book I haven’t looked at in more than fifty years. True confession: I was struck by the cringe-worthy scenes of domestic violence and animal abuse in the first half of the book, scenes I had never recalled from my reading the book in my youth. What I did remember was the poetic intensity of the concluding chapters of the novella, when the protagonist Meursault is in prison awaiting execution for murder. At one point he says, “From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come.”

Against his wishes, Meursault is visited in his cell by a priest, but finds “…none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.” He is so provoked by the chaplain, that Meursault grasps him about the neck and shouts his rage at him. When the priest finally leaves, Meursault says, “It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”

But it was the final sentence of the book that had so disrupted my quiet seminary education all those years ago. Interestingly, I’ve learned that newer translations have changed the wording to bring it more in line with the original French. The version I had read was the old one by Stuart Gilbert, who apparently took some poetic license in his rendering of cris de haine. That phrase is literally “cries of hate.” Unfortunately, we so overuse the word “hate” in English (“I hate that movie. I hate that hair style.”) that we’ve eviscerated the power it has in French, so I still like Gilbert’s translation: “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.” That still gives me chills!

Currently, I’m slogging my way through The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s pretty dense, and my philosophic chops aren’t as honed as they used to be, so it can be hard going! The Plague made great reading during the pandemic. Its lucid humanity can be a bracing tonic for these divided times. I think I’ve repeated my favorite line from that novel many times before: “…a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

If you’re new to Camus, you might want to try starting with The Plague or with a shorter work like The Fall. He was also a marvelous essayist, and I’ve always been fond of “Nuptials at Tipasa.” After JFK’s death, brother Bobby Kennedy immersed himself in Camus, so you’ll be in good company.