2019 Interlude #2 Albert Camus

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 4

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

Albert Camus's final point of The Physics of Happiness, Creation, is my favorite. In this one word, there are so many thoughts. When I think of creation, I think about everything from baking a batch of cookies to the Christian notion that god created the world in seven days.

In this physics of Camus, creation has to come last. In a way, the points before this one are necessary to promote creation. When I think about it, life in the open air is the stuff that it means to be human. The constant relationship with the day, the world in which we share with countless people, animals, stars, plants and sensations certainly opens the mind up to all sorts of thoughts and experiences. Love of another being too gives us the power to live our life in the way we as social beings need to have. When we have love, give love and share love, we able to move to the next set of desires. In a way, this is not different from what Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" tells us of our needs. And Freedom from ambition? How does that lead us to Creation.

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 3

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

When I was first introduced to Albert Camus's The Physics of Happiness, I understood very clearly and very instantly the first two points. I knew life in the open air was important and in my younger years I work about a quarter of the year in the country living in a tent. I understood the importance of love of another being. I may not have understood it when love and friend was given to me, but I understood it all too well when it was denied to me. Yes, in my younger days, the first two points made complete sense. But the third point, freedom from ambition?

How is could freedom from ambition be reasonable to a young man in modern America. I was, and in many ways I still am, very competitive. I love a challenge and I especially enjoy a challenge which I can overcome. I may not be the sort of person who has to win a race, or a have the best time in an event, but try to play cards with me.

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 2

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

I am a very fortunate man. I have a family of my own, people I am tied to either genetically or because we have allowed our relationship to be sanctioned by state and god. I have a small family, just three of us. We are bound together, living out our collective life, in a wonderful mode of love and domestic tasks. I am very fortunate. But I haven't always been. I have had times of loneliness.

My times of loneliness were due to geography or circumstances. Circumstances are by far more remote than any geography can take us. Times of loneliness when I felt like there was no one else I could talk to, no one to save me from danger or from my thoughts, thankfully did not come very often. Again, I am a very fortunate man.

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

The first time I was exposed to Albert Camus was The Stranger. It was in the spring time. I carried a copy of the slim volume in my school bag. On the outer shores of downtown Denver on the Auraria Campus, I read Camus while the massive clouds drifted up over the Rocky Mountains some few miles away. In my younger years, so much of my freedom, so much of the peace I knew, so much of how I would later shift and form my life came from books and records. Books and records and the hours I spent reading or listening to music. It was a spring day when I read Camus. I was outside in the grass and I could hear the sounds of a downtown Denver that was on the move, on the move from a dirty derelict little western town to a major metropolitan city resting right next to ceiling of the continent.