βIn Sisyphus, we can suddenly see Camus' basic mistake. Life, he explains, is "absurd"βmeaningless. You get up in the morning, go to work, spend four hours in the office or factory, eat lunch, work four more hours, go home, eat, sleep, for five days a weekβ endlessly. And one day you suddenly feel a great weariness and ask: "Why?" One stage further still, and you begin to experience what Sartre calls "nausea," "sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman. . . ." We manage to live with material objects by imposing our feelings on them, until the truth dawns upon us. You see a man in a telephone booth, and again you become aware of the absurd. All of his expressions are part of a dumb show.
This last example really gives the game away. For this kind of absurdity is untrue. Camus' absurdity is not reality seen naked; it is reality deliberately distorted or drained of meaning. To point to a reality drained of meaning, and then to claim that this example proves reality itself is meaningless, is a strange kind of logic. Camus' vision of the world is the vision of a young romantic, heavily tinged with self-pity and a sense of personal inadequacy. Nietzsche began his career in much the same way, by swallowing Schopenhauer in one monstrous gulp, and then groaning with indigestion for two or three years. But Nietzsche outgrew his juvenile pessimism, and created Zarathustra. Camus found the process of transition slower and more painful, because he insisted on clinging to the fallacy that "absurdity" (or "nausea") is a vision of the fundamental truthβlife seen without illusions. His failure to see through the fallacy is typical of the lack of logic that characterizes French philosophy in general.β - Colin Wilson, ββLuckyβ Camusβ (August 1979)
