‘Spooks’ by MC *
Not that one has read a great deal of him but Albert Camus came surging out of my memory bank from some 30 years ago. Somewhat predictably, what came out was his splendid, if characteristically austere, opening line from his 1942 masterpiece ‘L'Etranger’ or ‘The Ousider’ that I read in English.
In that translation by Joseph Laredo the opening line reads, "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." I remember not wanting to read beyond that extraordinary line so clinical, detached and so utterly shorn of any overt feeling. I was done with the novel with the very first line.
The original in French goes,"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas."
A new translation of ‘The Outsider’ by Sandra Smith in 2012 subtly but very significantly altered the line saying, "My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." The addition of the possessive pronoun “My” does considerably change the emotional quotient of the sentence by making it more personal, intimate. Given my temperament, I prefer the one without the possessive pronoun. I am not qualified to say whether the original French had enough in it to add “My” but I am told not.
The reason why Camus came to mind is because I came across a reconstructed conversation with him on the current issue of Nautilus. The theme of the conversation is “the absurd” which seems rather appropriate given the current climate here in America, there in India and in many countries. Of course, the absurd has always unfolded throughout human history but it appears to be heightened these days because the proliferation of tools—namely social media—to carry it around the globe. I can refer to the tyranny of tweets but that is not my purpose this morning. I am more interested in the idea of the absurd.
The “reconstructed” conversation with Camus by Kevin Burger is of some interest to me. Camus’ “answers” in the “interview” as, Burger points out in Footnotes, “are drawn from his writings.” I have tried this inventive format a couple of times in different contexts before. It is always fun.
As if as an accompaniment to what I was thinking about I was also watching ‘Morning Joe’ on MSNBC where the hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski were responding to a particularly vicious tweettack (My coinage for tweet attack) by President Donald Trump. I would not like to go into details of what they said other than summing up to say that they were deeply worried about the president’s mental state. It was an expansion on what they wrote in The Washington Post this morning .
I look at such developments, as I do the rest of existence, with a sense of detachment. It was perhaps in that context that I thought of Camus’ "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." It is while searching for an online version of ‘The Outsider’ that I came across the Nautilus piece. So there. That’s all there is to it.
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* The painting of mine titled ‘Spooks’ which illustrates the post was done sometime ago. I like many of the faces in it and their bewilderment. I had no particular emotional state of mind in mind when I did it but looking at it this morning all of those faces are an amalgamation of what I feel now—a sense of weary absurdity about existence.