The Shallow Future Is Already Here

After his friend Albert Camus died in a car crash, aged 46, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Every life that is cut off — even the life of so young a man — is at one and the same time a phonograph record that is shattered and a complete life.” Three years earlier, Camus had won the Nobel Prize. As an author and philosopher, he was at the height of his powers, and on the cusp of writing a trilogy about love — the culmination of his earlier trilogies about “the absurd” and “revolt.” It might have been a lasting work of philosophy. But it was not to be. “For all those who loved him,” Sartre continued, “there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work.”