On Camus...........................

 

"I wanted to change lives, yes," Camus wrote when young, "but not the world, which I worshipped as divine."

     His deepest gift, always, had to do with finding the confidence to affirm: "The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death."  His enduring lesson was that the difficulty—the irrationality—of life need not rob us of our joy.  That Sisyphus's efforts will always be fruitless need not mean that his life is wasted.  A plague can awaken heroism and compassion precisely because we are no longer sleepwalking through life.

-Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence