Books We Can't Quit: Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus, 1968

384 pages, $11

Review by Gabriel Gilbert

I can’t quit Albert Camus’ lyrical essays. Better known for The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, his lyrical essays differ in that they read more like prose poetry. I found his essays by chance around the same age Camus was when he wrote them—in my mid 20’s. What’s hard to quit is the fact that he writes in the language of someone sensing the end of youth.

Camus confesses in the preface that “there is more love in these awkward pages than in all those that have followed.” That love takes on the form of an urgent yearning for the past. Camus senses that life is fleeting, yet nothing escapes him. The sun bleached beaches and ancient Roman ruins in Tipasa—his home—serve as Camus’ muse while he struggles to catch his breath in search for that place where “his heart first opened.” His prose is biting. He contends with a world where war has robbed the young of innocence and life. His essays are underscored with a certain elegy.

Concerned that he doesn’t “know any longer whether I’m living or remembering,” Camus tries to reconcile intractable loss. He sees his home as a place where “everything is given to be taken away”—a thought he would put a finer point on in his philosophical writings. He worries that age begets a certain inflexibility and that “nothing amazes us anymore, everything is known, and our life is spent in starting again.”

Like his favorite Greek anti-hero Sisyphus, Camus is untiring. He writes that “[t]here is no art where there is nothing to be overcome.” With the surety of his task, he circles around a fact he never quite puts into words, or is afraid to—that which he has known is gone forever. He pines for a time when those words lacked so fine a tip. What follows is a man panting for life without exception. Hinting at the futility of his ambition, Camus writes that, “[e]ach word goes beyond the object it claims to designate . . . The word contains something further, but this something further is still not enough.”

There is an immediacy in every essay that lingers long after I’m finished reading. I am jealous of Camus. The way he writes about Tipasa makes me wonder if I’ve ever known a home at all. He wanders from one city to the next combing the alleys for—for what? Even he cannot say. I simply want to feel how he feels.

The last twenty pages are devoted to interviews in which Camus is asked, “[To w]hat values in a work of art—and especially in a literary work of art—are you most sensitive?” “Truth,” he answers. I cannot deny the truth in his essays. Only, they are his truth and not mine. It’s not that I don’t have one, it’s that he is so adept at voicing his. It’s hard to not want to make it mine. Again, a certain jealousy creeps and I return to his essays, not only to learn how to write, but how to feel.

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Gabriel Gilbert is an English major at The Ohio State University.