WITH THE QUICKENING CASCADE of political, social, and natural crises in our country, the faith in progress—the belief that good will and steady work leads to a better world—is a difficult faith to maintain. There have been times when the arc of history seemed to bend toward justice. But lately it’s snapped back the other way. It’s as if we’ve heaved a great boulder toward the mountain top, and we’re now watching it, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, as it careens back to the ground below. It feels that there is something absurd, in fact literally Sisyphean, to our predicament.
Albert Camus felt that way in his time. By the late 1930s, the French-Algerian writer had reason to think he was condemned to the same punishment as the mythical hero. As a teenager, he began to cough up blood; diagnosed with tuberculosis, Camus had to live each day as if it were his last. As the son of an illiterate, largely deaf and mute mother, he endured silence with the person he most loved. As a young man of the left, Camus watched France’s Popular Front government collapse while the forces of totalitarianism strengthened across Europe.
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