#failings

The first complete translation of Albert Camus’s personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, including new material never before published in English.

Available December 05, 2025.

Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks that offers an unrivaled glimpse into the writer at his most personal and reflective. These notebooks contain his thoughts on politics, solitude, personal failings and regrets, his travels, and his relationships with friends and rivals. They also provide insight into his process as a thinker—his frustrations, his ideas for novels and plays (some pursued and others abandoned), his routines, his aspirations, and his self-recriminations.

For Camus devotees, there is no more intimate experience than reading these notebooks. On the one hand, his fallibility is on full display: He is irritated by mediocrity, frustrated with his health, plagued by insomnia, and miserable about life’s petty necessities. Yet, he is also intensely curious and observant, sometimes moved to rapture by landscapes and people. Readers will experience the bounty of Camus’s philosophical imagination and will witness firsthand how his ideas take shape. The notebooks contain drafts of letters to friends and recorded reflections on the compromises that being in the world demands.

This publication marks the first time Camus’s complete notebooks have been published in one comprehensive volume. Expertly and movingly translated by Ryan Bloom with extensive footnotes contextualizing the entries, The Complete Notebooks will remain a literary treasure for years to come.

One of the great surprises on the human journey is that we come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing our own contradictions, and making friends with our own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than appreciate them because they have little to communicate and show little curiosity. Shadow work is what I call “falling upward.” God hid holiness quite well: the proud will never recognize it, and the humble will fall into it every day—not even realizing it is holiness.

Twice I asked for clear details on where he would be. Once I was condescended to because he wasn't go on the trip, and the second time someone promised me an email with details (on behalf of another teacher) and that email never came. How can a kid with severe anxiety who can't speak at school and won't attend a trip be expected to turn up and not know what is happening to him? They'll mark it as unauthorised absences for today, of course, and it'll be a black mark against us - and it could be avoided with communication and understanding of mental health and autism.

Mainstream schools are NOT built for our SEND kids, and despite them getting close to £500,000 in funding (based on numbers given to me by the SENCo herself) - just for those on the SEND register - the school consistently lets them down, with no understanding beyond the medical model they spend a couple of hours a year being 'trained' in. Where's the support? Where's the person-centred care and attention? Where is taking a moment to remember what each particular child's needs and struggles are?

Come la tua voce

che ritorna

come un racconto

una nostalgia,

come un destino

un viaggio,

in questo andare e venire

di giorni che hai lasciato.

Ci sono mancanze

che abitano nelle ossa.

Was scrambling to get some dental done in the mean time lest the HI not be renewed.

It’s looking like it might be though, which is a relief, because I’ve been abstaining from taking the month left of ADD meds available (been taking the Str meanwhile, but on its own it’s not very anything) and MY GOD.

I am not getting anything done like this.

This is unsustainable.