Part 1—Camus and Lincoln
A couple of months ago, I was sitting in a cafe on Boulevard du Montparnasse, having a drink before dinner, rereading THE REBEL, half-hoping to be interrupted by some intellectual Parisienne, fluent in English or willing to speak French slowly. As always with Camus, I understood the words and sentences but didn’t feel certain of his point. The book seemed to be an elaboration of his MYTH OF SYSIPHUS complaint about the absurdity of the universe, but if you’re right about the gods being dead, what does it profit you to condemn their craftsmanship of the universe?
Sisyphus, sentenced to eternally roll a boulder to the top of a mountain and watch it roll back down to the place at which he started, is Camus’ metaphor for the meaninglessness of life. He offers three alternatives: 1-Live “authentically.” Emulate Sisyphus, who (claims Camus) accepts his fate with dignity, even joy; 2-Be cowardly. Commit suicide and duck out of life prematurely. 3- Live shamefully. Embrace some religion that promises paradise after death, or some political creed that promises it right here on earth.
I admire Camus, but don’t feel persuaded by his argument. If life is meaningless, how meaningful is Sisyphus’s stoicism? How cowardly is suicide? How shameful is acceptance (with a dignity equal to Sisyphus’s) of some religious or political creed?
A woman at the next table, with whom I’d exchanged smiles, stood up with her husband. She smiled again as they left—the smile of a woman happy with the day, happy with the weather, happy with life. Moments later a less-happy woman took the smiling woman’s place, asked for a menu and consulted at length with the waiter about what to eat and which wine to drink. If there’s any town where waiters are questioned more vigorously about the provenance, quality, and preparation of the food than Paris, it’s some other town in France--Nice, Biarritz, Lyons.
Returning to Camus, I vaguely heard the unhappy woman order a cassoulet and red wine and the waiter soon returned with a fifteen-centiliter glass. With all the consultation I’d expected at least a carafe. That led me to close Camus and consider Lincoln.
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from the divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
He spoke that to a nation of thirty million in the last months of a war in which six hundred fifty thousand fell--thirty million builders of wealth in a wilderness where no wealth had existed before them. Now we’re ten times thirty million, all demanding “our fair share” of the increase in that wealth.
If I understand Camus correctly, his Absurd is an equilateral triangle standing on its apex. The left leg is the universe as we wish it to be—one in which we live forever and in which it happens to the wicked according to the work of the wicked and to the just according to the work of the righteous. The right leg is the universe as it is—one in which we die at a date uncertain, in which rewards and punishments are delivered at random if not with malice. The legs grow farther apart as they advance toward their separate vanishing points; the gap between them is Camus’ Absurd.
If I understand Lincoln correctly, instead of accepting the gap in Camus’ triangle as a given, he bends the legs to close the gap. He bent himself from the son of a man who couldn’t read into one who knew the Bible, Shakespeare, and the poets and political thinkers by heart. Into lawyer, legislator, congressman and president. Clearing land, planting corn, splitting rails, reading law. After bending himself, he learned to bend the universe. If it took war to save the Union, he waged war; if it took making Nevada a state to pass the thirteenth amendment, he made Nevada a state.
To be continued
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