It feels like some of the issues on subjectivity, free will, and the bulk of the 'minus world' chapter (the Land of No Language) lost me in the book; however, I'm still thinking about them after a series of weird dreams last night. Maybe the questions raised by the book are just working through me slowly, like a buttermilk biscuit eaten without a drink of water.
KOTS also wins my personal award for best depiction of a library in literary foreign fiction.
In other distracting news, new books arrived from Amazon today: a collection of Ogden Nash poems and the last volume of Camus' Notebooks.
An entry from the latter it would have been helpful to read a lot earlier in life:
Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.-- Camus (in Notebook VII, circa 1951-54)
Elsewhere in his notebooks, Camus lists his ten favorite words in response to an anonymously asked question:
world, pain, earth, mother, men, desert, honor, poverty, summer, sea.
Words reveal a lot about a person, and of course all these words were in Camus in their French form rather than English translation.
The question/answer of one's favorite words is a form of status expression which encourages others to list their own words, or at least think of 'em. This might be worth doing in a future blog post. For now I'll just observe that the French words for sea and mother (la mer and la mère) are homonyms. Camus had his Mama doubly on his mind.
2 comments:
I don't have ten favorite words, I think, or even one. When I was a kid, I used to like "excruciating."
Are you here? I'm here! But the email I have for you doesn't work.
yah try evan.d.baer@gmail let's hang out
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