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Naturally, they also have a taste for simple pleasures: they love women, the movies, and swimming in the sea.
Literally the plot of The Stranger
It’s just regrettable that the city was built with its back turned to this bay, and as a result, it is impossible to glimpse the sea, and you always have to go looking for it.
sick woman
Pretty callous description of his wife
aide
Ditto
“we’ll start over.”
She dead
as if it was allowing its boils and pus to come to the surface after what had, until then, been an internal struggle.
“Understood,” he said. “Let’s leave it be, I’ll come back in two or three days.
Putting his career on the line, immense compassion. Police attitudes towards suicide attempts were not kind during this story
the concierge was suffocating beneath an invisible heaviness.
our fellow citizens realized they had never thought our little city could be singled out as the kind of place where rats died in broad daylight and concierges perished from mysterious diseases.
No one believes misfortune will fall upon them.
But others among our fellow citizens, and not all of them concierges or poor people, would have to take the same path that M. Michel had been first to tread.
When it affects the rich...
After these few indications, Tarrou wondered why Camps had joined the marching band against his best interests, and what profound reasons might have led him to risk his life for these Sunday parades.
Lol
If one of his gobs hit its mark, he would laugh.
Bros a psychopath
‘Exactly,’ he replied. ‘Now we’re just like everyone else.’
Camus' sense of humor really shining in this passage
“Private sorrows, that’s well put.”
Lovely sense of humor
“that you’re the one making trouble for people.”
Attitudes towards suicide in the past were so callous
Public opinion is sacred: no panic, above all, no panic.
COVID response upholds this sentiment all these years later
Stupidity always endures, people notice it if they think outside themselves.
But it doesn’t always pass, and, from bad dream to bad dream, it’s the humans who pass, and the humanists first, because they didn’t heed the warnings.
Rings true today with the COVID epidemic
And since a dead man carries no weight unless you’ve seen him dead, a hundred million corpses strewn across history are nothing but smoke in the imagination.
Humans struggle to show empathy to those they don't know. Compassion is a truly admirable trait
Gather up the people at the exits of five cinemas, take them to a city square, and make them die in piles to see it a little more clearly.
Holy macabre
People made rough, approximate calculations, with clear chances for error.
And such a pacifying, indifferent calmness refuted, almost without effort, the old images of scourges, Athens, plagued and deserted by the birds, the Chinese cities full of people agonizing in silence, the convicts of Marseille piling decomposing corpses in holes, the construction in Provence of the great wall that would stop the furious winds of pestilence, Jaffa and its hideous beggars, the moist, rotten beds stuck to the earthen floor of the Constantinople hospital, the sick dragged with hooks, the carnival of masked doctors during the Black Plague, the living people coupling in the
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You could imagine the glowing pyres by the calm, dark water, the battles with torches bursting sparks into the night and the thick, poisonous vapors rising into the attentive sky. You could fear…
Incredible imagery, Camus at his best
At first glance, in fact, Joseph Grand was nothing more than the low-level city clerk he appeared to be. Tall and thin, he floated in his clothes, always picking garments a size too big, mistakenly thinking they would last longer. Though he still had most of the teeth in his lower gums, he had lost most of those from his upper jaw. His smile, which mainly lifted his top lip, revealed a mouthful of shadows. If you add to this portrait a seminarian’s gait, an art of hugging walls and slipping through doorways, a smell of basements and smoke, and all the signs of insignificance, you must admit
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Camus' character descriptions match his love for the absurd. Yet with logical flow makes it enjoyable to follow and prevents it from becoming long-winded
But the prospect of a life materially assured by honest means and, when he left work, the possibility to devote himself, without guilt, to his favorite pastimes, made him very pleased.
Dream life lol
According to him, he felt particularly stuck about using the word “right,” which he wasn’t sure about, or the word “promises,” which would have implied he was claiming his due, and would have shown his character in a bold light that was incompatible with the modesty of his duties. On the other hand, he refused to use the terms “goodwill,” “request,” or “gratitude,” which he could not reconcile with his personal dignity.
But, to evoke such simple emotions, the least word caused him great pains.
He's just like me fr fr
He knew this impression was stupid, but he couldn’t believe that the plague would really take hold in a city where you could find modest clerks who cultivated honorable obsessions.
As a consequence, the prefect did not doubt for an instant that his constituents would employ the most dedicated cooperation with his own personal efforts.
Since his suicide attempt, Cottard hadn’t received any visits. In the streets, in the shops, he sought out every kindness. No one had ever spoken so sweetly to the grocers or listened to a tobacconist with such interest.
I feel for him, he just wants to be treated normally after such a turbulent time. He's working hard to overcome the stigma of suicide
In the middle of an animated conversation, she had mentioned a recent arrest that caused controversy in Algiers. A young office worker had killed an Arab on a beach.
The stranger!
Like Cottard, he too felt a need for human warmth.
Sums up his writing from the previohs pages succinctly
At the time, the weather seemed to settle. The sun bailed out the puddles left by the last rains. The beautiful blue skies giving off a yellow light, the hums of airplanes in the growing heat, the whole season encouraged serenity. In four days, however, the fever made four surprising leaps: sixteen dead, twenty-four, twenty-eight, and thirty-two.
A growing serenity amidst a growing pandemic
So we copied them mechanically, trying to give, through the medium of these dead sentences, some sign of our difficult lives. And to put an end to this sterile, pigheaded monologue, to this arid conversation with a wall, resorting to the conventional telegram began to seem preferable.
Husbands and lovers who thought they had the greatest trust in their partners found themselves jealous. Men who thought they were casual lovers discovered their loyalty. Sons who had once lived close to their mother and barely looked at her now poured their worry and regret into a single wrinkle on her forehead that haunted their memory. This brutal separation, unadulterated and unpredictable, left us disconcerted, unable to fight against the memory of that presence, still so close and already so far away, which now occupied our days. In truth, we suffered twice over—our own suffering first
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Camus at his best
At that moment, the collapse of their courage, their will, and their patience was so quick that it seemed they would never again climb out of this hole. As a result, they compelled themselves never to think of the date of their release, to no longer think of the future, and to keep their eyes down, so to speak. But, naturally, there were no rewards for this caution, this way of deceiving sorrow, of shutting down their defenses to refuse the fight. But while people held at bay the collapse they wanted to avoid at all costs, they deprived themselves of those moments, which were otherwise quite
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Camus' idea of worthless living, going through the motions
