I work on these book notes following a night of extreme anxiety. On the verge of a panic attack. Only narrowly avoided. Maybe not even avoided, but just experienced for a few passing moments. Still feeling the after-affects this morning. Feeling fragile. Listening to Malte Marten’s Healing Frequencies.

Just thinking these are my takeaways. Isn’t it interesting that we can both read this same book and have such drastly different experiences and takeaways? I mean there are core themes that exist across both of our experiences, which is magical on its own.

He was killed in a road accident in 1960. His last novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man), unfinished at thetime of his death, appeared for the first time in 1994.

pv - “belief that ideology must serve humanity, not the contrary, and that the ends did not justify the means.”

pvi - “Camus antagonized both the right and the left. At the time of his death he was very much isolated and subject to attacks from all sides”

pvi - “Finally, it is obvious that my father would never have published thsi manuscript as it is, first for the simple reason that he had not completed it, but also because he was a very reserved man and would no doubt have masked his own feelings far more in its final version.”

p6 - “‘You’re in pain’, the man said … a night in the autumn of 1913.”

p19 - “‘He was my father… I was less than a year old when he died.’” … visit this dead stranger"

p20 - “The man buried under the slab, who had been his father, was younger than he. … this soil was strewn with children.”

p21 - “eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanteing to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but for ever.”

p21 - “He looked back on his life, a life that had been foolish, courageous, cowardly, wilful, and always straining towards that goal which he knew nothing about, and actually that life had all gone by without his having tried to imagine who this man was who had given him that life and then immediately had gone off to die in a strange land on the other side of the seas.”

It's this feeling of wonder. Dreaming. Questioning. I feel felt. My life is spent day dreaming. Thinking.

p22 - “he could learn who this man had been who now seemed closer to him than any other being on this earth.”

p23 - “‘we never know anyone.’”

p27 - “made the mistake of asking others about her. … my own view of her became confused.”

p28 - “I’ve loved life, I’m hungry for it. At the same time, life seems horrible to me, it seems inaccessible. That is why I am a believer, out of scepticism. Yes, I want to believe, I want to live, forever.”

p46 - you lose yourself when you lose a partner.

p46 - “‘You’re very beautiful,’ and he stopped himself. He had always thought that of his mother and had never dared to tell her so. … it would have meant breaching the invisible barrier behind which for all his life he had seen her take shelter”

p47 - “had seldom heard her laugh wholeheartedly”

p51 - ==“their enemies were not men”==

p53 - “shipping out that night for the France he had never seen … light of the morning from which he would never return”

p55 - “each day hundreds of new orphans, Arab and French, awakened in every corner of Algeria, sons and daughters without fathers who would now have to learn to live without guidance and without heritage.”

p60 - “life in its entirety was a misfortune you could not struggle against but could only endure.”

p60 - “‘I’m old. I can’t run anymore.’ … a dying person he had suddenly seen on her face. … I’m too old now. I want to stay home.”

p62 - “poor people’s memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space beecause they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are grey and featureless.”

p62 - “Rememberance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.”

p64 - Jacques fear of his own execution what used to be a dream. “by the time he had come of age, world events around him were such that his execution was no longer so unlikely a possibility, and reality no longer assuaged his dreams, but on the contrary was fed during a very [precise] number of years by the same dread that so distressed his father and that he had left to his son as his only clear and certain legacy.”

p78 - ‘Your father, hard head. Did what he wanted, always."

p79 - “he was spellbound by the solitude where they were, between the sky and the sea, one as vast as the other”

p80 - The uncle, who was just as poor, illiterate lived a better life; and gave more (“them oney he’d set aside and gave to Jacques”).

p83 - Etienne is a cool name. Etienne. Jacques. Daniel. Pierre. and Ernest

p86 - “Jacques began a time of ecstasy… Jacques felt himself to be the richest of children.”

p92 - “it is always easier to be extravagant when you have nothing. Few indeed are those who continue to be open-handed after they have acquired the means for it.”

p93 - “You like the good Lord for me!”

p96 - “For a long time Jacques held a grudge against his uncle, without knowing just what he was blaming him for. But, at the same time, he knew he could not hold him to blame, and that if the poverty, the infimities, the elemental need in which all his family lived did not excuse everything, in any case they made it impossible to pass judgement on those who were its victims.”

p102 - “so vast that the child felt tears coming to his eyes along with a great cry of joy and gratitude for this wonderful life.”

p103 - “They went on living in poverty, though they were no longer in need, but they were set in their ways, and they looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do.”

p104 - “they lived now in proximity to death”

p106 - “his weight as a man to change the destiny of this child”

p112 - “M. Bernard, this class was always interesting for the simple reason that he loved his work with a passion.”

p113 - reading gave him an imagination … “For Jacques, these stories were exotic as they could possibly be. He dreamed about them, filled his compositions with descriptions of a world he had never seen…”

p113 - “Only school gave Jacques and Pierre these joys. And no doubt what they so passionately loved in school was that they were not at home, where want and ignorance made life harder and more bleak, as if closed in on itself; poverty is a fortress without drawbridges.”

p114 - “No, school did not just provide them an escape from family life. At least in M Bernard’s class, it fed a hunger in them more basic even to the child than to the man, and that is the hunger for discovery.”

p114 - “he never said a word against religion in class, nor against anything that could be the object of a choice or a belief.”

Books build imagination. They build you. They build adults.

p121 - “knew that the war is no good, because vanquishing a man is as bitter as being vanquished.”

p124 - a mentor enlists. “‘Not for the war,’ he said, ‘but against Hitler…’

p124 - “lycee opens all doors … he wanted to obey M. Bernard … ‘My grandmother says we’re too poor and that I have to go to work next year.’ … ‘As for your mother… Don’t you ever forget her.’”

p128 - “the awful wear and tear of poverty, it becomes hard to find a place for religion.”

p129 - “Life, so vivid and mysterious, was enough to occupy his entire being.”

p132 - “for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution”

p133 - “the everyday mystery of his mother’s silence or her small smile when he entered the dining room at evening”

p137 - “he knew in advance that this success had just uprooted him from the warm and innocent world of the poor — a world closed in on itself like an island in the society where poverty took the place of family and community”

p141 - “with the same blood of men. We’ll kill each other for a little longer, cut off each other’s balls and torture each other a bit. And then we’ll go back to living as men together. The country wants it that way.”

p146 - “decks swept for five days and five nights by a polar wind, and the conquerors at the bottom of the hold, deathly ill, vomiting on each other and wanting to die, until they arrived … to them it was the end of the world, between the deserted sky and the dangerous land”

p147 - “ten of them would die a day. … You had to dance to stir up the blood.”

p150 - “locked within themselves”

p150 - “the temples have been destroyed, and all that is left is this soft unbearable burden on the heart… a life that grew around him, in spite of him; until the war killed and buried him; from then and for ever unknown to his people and his son, he too was returned to that immense oblivion that was the ultimate homeland of the men of his people … all these found and lost children who built transient towns in order to die for ever in themselves and in others. … for ever lost in the ashes… there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed for ever.”

p152 - “all of them are threatened with eternal anonymity and the loss of the only consecrated traces of their passage on this earth”

p153 - “The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me, one where memories and names are preserved in measured spaces, the other where the wind and sand erase all trace of men on the open ranges. He had tried to escape from anonymity, from a life that was poor, ignorant, and mulish; he could not live that life of blind patience, without words, with no thought beyond the present. [surviving]”

p158 - “what Jacques brought home from the lycee could not be assimilated, and the silence grew between him and his family.”

p159 - “A child is nothing by himself; it is his parents who represent him. It is through them that he defines himself, that he is defined in the eyes of the world. … once become a man … For one is judged, for better or worse, by what one is and much less on one’s family, since it even happens that the family is judged in its turn by the child become a man.”

p160 - “how can it be made clear that a poor child can sometimes be ashamed without ever being envious?”

p162 - “this notion of country had no meaning to Jacques … France was an abstraction that people called upon and that sometimes laid claim to you, a bit like that God”

p163 - “Jacques, and Pierre … felt themselves to be of another species, with no past, no family home, no attic full of letters and photos… ignorant of God … remained devoted to the one who was most like him, and that was Pierre.”

p186 - “the war was part of their universe”

p187 - “he was struck by the miraculous nature of the body’s mechanics, along with an unreasoning fear at the idea that he too might be mutilated”

p190 - “But reading enabled him to escape into a world of innocence where wealth and poverty were equally interesting because both were utterly unreal. … transport him to a world of comedy or heroism, where his two basic appetites, for joy and for courage, were satisfied.”

p193 - ==magic of books to transport. “the contents of these books mattered little. What did matter was what they first felt when they went into the library, where they would see not the walls of black books but multiplying horizons and expanses that, as soon as they crossed the doorstep, would take them away from the cramped life of the neighborhood."==

p193 - “each book had its own smell according to the paper on which it was printed, always delicate and discreet, but so distinct that with his eyes closed J. could have told a book in the Nelson series from one of the contemporary editions Fasquelle was then publishing. And each of these odours, even before he had begun reading, would transport Jacques to another world full of promises already [kept], that was beginning even now to obscure the room where he was, to blot out the neighborhood itself and its noises, the city, and the whole world, which would completely vanish as soon as he began reading with a wild exalted intensity that would transport the child into an ecstasy so total that even repeated commands could not extract him: ‘Jacques, for the third time, set the table.’”

p206 - “had lost what used to transfigure it, its sky, its open spaces, its clamour.”

p207 - Boredom of white collar adult work. Very D.F.W-esque. “until the smell of paper and glue, at first exquisite, finally became the very odour of boredom for him … From the window you could see the street and the buildings across it, but never the sky.”

Wanting to go back to being poor. Simpler times where the focus was just on staying alive.

p208 - “Sometimes, but not often, Jacques was sent on an errand, to get office supplies from the nearby stationery store or to the post office to send an urgent money order. The central post office was located two hundred metres away, on a broad boulevard that led from the port up to the summits of the hills on which the city was built. Jacques would rediscover space and light on this boulevard. The post office itself, in an immense rotunda, was lit by three large doors and light trickling through a huge cupola. But more often, unfortunately, Jacques was made to post the mail at the end of the day, after leaving the office, and then it was justm ore drudgery, for he had to run, at the timewhen the day was beginning to fade, to a post office beseiged by a crowd of customers, get in line at the windows, and the wait made his workday still longer. The long summer was practically used up for Jacques in dark days without sparkle and in trivial occupations. ‘You can’t go on without doing anything,’ his grandmother said. But it was precisely in the office that Jacques felt he wasn’t doing anything. … to him real work — a lengthy physical effort, a series of skilful, precise actions by hard, quick-moving hands — and you saw the result of your labour take shape. … But this office work came from nowhere and led nowhere. Selling and buying, everything turned on these ordinary, petty actions. Although he had lived till then in poverty, it was in this office that Jacques discovered the mundane, and he wept for the light he had lost. His co-workers were not the cause of the feeling that he was being smothered. They were nice to him, they never rudely ordered him around … Jacques sat on his chair waiting for the order that would cause him to do some absurd hurrying about — what his grandmother called ‘work’. When we could stand it no longer, when he was literally boiling over on his chair, he would go down to the yard behind the store and hide between the cement walls of the poorly lit, Turkish toilet, with its sour pervading odour of urine. In this dark place he would close his eyes, and, breathing the familiar smell, he would dream.”

p210 - “Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poverty.”

p215 - “he wanted, but only joy, and free spirits, and energy, and all that life has that is good, that is mysterious, that is not and never will be for sale…. to be as he was now”

p217 - “this was the very country into which he felt that he had been tossed, as if he were the first inhabitant, or the first conqueror, landing where the law of the jungle still prevailed…”. We’re all just learning how to be an adult. Or, as matter of fact, be “human”.

p219 - “to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him … he found it with the dog. … that mad passion for living”

p219 - “time of his youth was slipping away”

p220 - “rather to stay young, always young”

p221 - “an unalloyed passion for life confronting death; today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances — that, as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion.”

p234 - “Heart disease. Living on borrowed time. ‘If I commit suicide, at least it will be my choice.’ ‘You alone will know why I killed myself. You know my principles. I hate those who commit suicide. Because of what they do to others. If you have to do it, you must disguise it. Out of kindness. Why am I telling you this? Because you love misfortune. It’s a present I’m giving you. Bon appetit!’

p238 - “And what he wanted most in the world, which was for his mother to read everything that was his life and his being, that was impossible. His love, his only love, would be forever speechless.”

p238 - “Jean, eternally unsatisfied.”