NOTEBOOKS 1951-59: ALBERT CAMUS

                                    

Notebooks 1951–1959: Private  Diary of Albert Camus 

 I want to thank the Jersey City Public Library (JCPL) , for lending me this published private diary  of Albert Camus, 

 I finished it today , and I am grateful in a way that feels almost private. This is the real Camus, not the public voice polished for essays or novels, but the man writing to himself in fragments he never intended for us to read. It reads like a diary kept in the margins of a life, and that is precisely why it moved me so deeply. Tears of joy, sympathy, and solidarity welled up in my eyes more than once, because here is a writer struggling to be decent in an indecent time, and refusing to look away.

One entry stops me cold: “I struggle like a fish caught in the net’s meshes.” That is the absurd condition in a single line, and you can feel him fighting against it. 

Then, with devastating honesty: “I sometimes accuse myself of being incapable of love. Maybe this is true, but I have been able to select a few people and to keep for them faithfully, the best of me, no matter what they do.” That is not philosophy. That is a promise. 

When the news of the Nobel Prize came, he wrote: “Nobel! Strange feeling of overwhelming pressure and melancholy. At 20 years old, I was poor and naked, I knew true glory : My Mother.” 

And later, with a tenderness that aches: “I loved those places, luminous restaurants, dance halls, etc., that men invented to shelter themselves from life . This wounded thing inside me.”

About truth , he notes at page 216 of his diary:

" A man of truth doesn't age. A little more effort and he will not die." 

And one more that I liked reads this:"somebody inside me has always tried , with all his strength, to be nobody." 

Thank you, JCPL, for putting this book in my hands.

( Avtar Mota)

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