Camus’s American Journals, Part 2

“The afternoon with students. They don’t feel the real problem; however, their nostalgia is evident. In this country where everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic, they feel something is missing. This great effort is pathetic, but one must reject the tragic after having looked at it, not before.”

(I probably should have pointed out that these quotes come from a notebook Camus kept while on a lecture tour of the United States in 1946. He also kept a notebook while on a South American lecture tour in 1949; the poverty and suffering he saw there supposedly informed a lot of The Plague. Both of these notebooks were published as American Journals in 1987.)