Recent conspiracy theories contend that the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was killed by the K.G.B., due to his vocal and courageous criticism of communism. Historian Robert Zaretsky rebukes the extraordinary claim:
“There is grim philosophical irony in the fact that Albert Camus should have died in a senseless automobile accident,” an article in The New York Times following his death began, “victim of a chance mishap.” But to those Camus left behind, death by car was not exactly senseless. While his contemporaries were turning to religion or ideologies to escape the absurd, they were also turning to, well, cars. Going fast — going too fast — in slim cars with seductive names like Citroën’s “Goddess” seemed to offer a ticket to eternity, and to many onlookers, a high-speed death seemed a sensible, almost poetic, end for the era’s brightest stars.
In its allusion to the absurd nature of Camus’s death, The Times got it only half right. A death, Camus noted, is not absurd or meaningless because it results from chance or a mishap, but instead because we refuse to accept the very possibility of senselessness. We insist upon meaning, even when we invent or impose it. It is our confrontation with the universe, not something inherent to the universe itself, that leads to absurdity. “The absurd,” he insisted, “depends as much on man as on the world.” It occurs when one combines the world’s silence with our need for understanding.(Image via The Daily Beast)
And it can occur at any moment, even or perhaps especially in cars. “At any street corner,” Camus warned, “the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” When a friend warned him about driving on highways, he replied, “Don’t worry, I hate speed and don’t like automobiles.” Owner of a rarely used Citroën, his attitude to speed matched his attitude to religious or ideological faith: they were false methods of relieving ourselves of the weight of our lives. Life, he believed, precisely because it is absurd, is our most precious and weighty possession.