What makes Camus a man of ideas? Here is a brief answer to that question. It has to do with what I will call the density of ideas within a writer’s text.

At the end of his little book, Think, Oxford, 1999, Simon Blackburn says:

The world is full of ideas, and a becoming sense of their power, their difficulty, their frailties, and their fallibility cannot be the least of the things it (the world) needs.

Now no one in my life ever said this, or anything like this to me, especially during my twenties when I was first becoming aware of the ideas and the great hold they would have on me throughout my lifetime right up until now, up until mesquatrevingtans. Blackburn’s few well chosen words do describe what I have learned from a lifetime’s experience of ideas (that which is not yet over, I trust, and that which more than anything else, still tired from not sleeping, gets me up in the mornings, more even than the thought of fresh brewed coffee and homemade bread and homemade jam that my wife and I would enjoy together, more even than those special mornings during the year, such as the delightful coolness of the  mornings in the Fall following the long summer heat of Tampa Florida where I live). What I have learned from being constantly introduced to ideas, mostly from the books and the various writings of others, but also from my own thinking and writing about my own ideas, as well as from my judging my surroundings and people, even the objects and the people closest to me, by the ideas they sometimes contained or held themselves, and from my judging them favorably or not so favorably.

I like to think I’m an idea man and until I turn back to my reading of the men of real, of great ideas, that is with direct contact with the hundreds, more like thousands of the real thinkers who have graced our species with their thoughts of what this life is all about, until then I think maybe I too am an idea man. Talk about standing on the shoulders of those who come before, I’ve rarely if ever got down from there to stand on my own two feet.

Here’s what I mean by a thinker with real, with important ideas, ideas that make me think, and in this particular case ideas I’m still struggling to grasp on my own terms, there being no other way to grasp anything. The following paragraph, rich in the writer’s ideas, each one of which could have stood on its own and been a book, is taken from Camus’ L’Homme Revolté. To read this paragraph in the original French alongside the English translation and in context go to, Beyond Nihilism.

There does exist for man, therefore, a way of acting and of thinking which is possible on the level of moderation to which he belongs. Every undertaking that is more ambitious than this proves to be contradictory. The absolute is not attained nor, above all, created through history. Politics is not religion, or if it is, then it is nothing but the Inquisition. How would society define an absolute? Perhaps everyone is looking for this absolute on behalf of all. But society and politics only have the responsibility of arranging everyone’s affairs so that each will have the leisure and the freedom to pursue this common search. History can then no longer be presented as an object of worship. It is only an opportunity that must be rendered fruitful by a vigilant rebellion.