I think in adolescence I started to take off. What I felt, saw, heard and read became the basis of all of my work
Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)
THE FALL
Stephanie
I didn’t read Camus’ novel The Fall until I was fifty one, but read the Englishman William Golding’s Free Fall when I was sixteen. This was a start. In the school library, I picked up Free Fall.
Later, many children were set to read Lord of the Flies.(1954)
Camus (1913 - 1960)Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 for La Chute (The Fall) * (I )quote : 'He was the ninth French author to become the recipient of the prize and the fourth philosopher after Bertrand Russell in 1950.’ (2 ) Author William Golding received this award in 1983.(3)
The Fall was published five years before the assassination of J.F. Kennedy. I remember hearing about that American death on the national radio on a transistor as I gathered with others around a tray of donuts at school. At the time I was drinking hot chocolate. Steam from the mug rose in the air and I had a huge shiver. From that point I was cognizant of International, Cold War and American relations. I recognized that events could reach us all.
Where Camus came to me is that he was the first writer that I became aware of as a young man who emerged out of a colonial experience. His first large mystery was to ask and wonder why, how and for what end did his father go off one day to be a soldier, by order, and quickly die. Then, as it occurred in 1994, with his children publishing his unfinished novel of 1962 The Last Man, I asked, what actual succor did Camus draw from his formative life? It came down to sunshine and poverty. He had a sentence, the joy of poverty. In child terms that did mean a summer of swimming and play - not a clerical job in the hot season.What gave Camus pleasure, as an adult, was to recognize the bliss of literate autonomy as well as its duties of seriousness. I determined to seek out the Simone de Beauvoir preface, then, that she wrote for Violette Leduc writing about her mother (La Bâtarde. 1964) (English translation only available in this country at the local University). I read Mad in Pursuit (1971). The fresh caterwauls into history in this novel's style and content reminded me of the credentials of de Beauvoir 's ' Second Sex'. thesis(1949)(4) Leduc's story was made into a film in 2013, by Martin Provost. It is a biographical film about Leduc. It exhibited in the special presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. at the same year that I made a global release of my third film. Mine was on designers in videogames in Los Angles. Sensibilities and interests in culture have spread broadly due to several digital accelerations. I never took time to read The Second Sex, even at age twenty- five when I was given a copy, for, I rather sought out the ideas about existentialism via cinema first not literature alone, as soon as I got underway with school in 1975. Coming from ' business class' I only thought about ' struggle' in a virtualizing sense. I had so little experience of recognition of poverty, but I did know the power of fear and violent action. For example, I was witness to a Warf strike in Sydney in 1970, there, graphic and voluminous in sound and image - we , David and I , were only passing through ---. I knew that I had been protected inside the 'The Pastoral 'of my migrant stories - Kent and Essex style - myinherited country life, whilst the cities of the world were going to throw up the discourses of politics.
The time of the 'Bay of Pigs’ (1961) crisis it was only eight years before I married David Robinson and then set out to see the world. Years would grow where I could build my own critique of how, when and where there are dangers when insights get ' lost in translation'. (5) The horror to me was my monolingualism. It took the mid seventies for me to start receiving first books in translation from French about film. The women of my past families, just four generations back, were fluent in German, English and Italian, could perform or teach Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms or Chopin. I do not know what they read. At my high school, a boarding school for Presbyterian Girls, I had become very hungry for the rather charming ritual whereby the girls rotated around the dining table each week, so that once every sixth week or so, one was dedicated to make conversation at the dinner table with a staff member at table top. For me, this was at least a start, to start conversations with adults. This piece of luck was one of my first incentives to accept a leadership role at school and increase my ratio of being nearer head of table more often. At age sixteen I accepted to be a House Captain. This at least gave me some mileage in speaking and sharing abstracts of thought. Also, ideas of valour - all in hyperbole, of course. The school had just two houses.
Camus (1913 - 1960)Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 for La Chute (The Fall) * (I )quote : 'He was the ninth French author to become the recipient of the prize and the fourth philosopher after Bertrand Russell in 1950.’ (2 ) Author William Golding received this award in 1983.(3)
The Fall was published five years before the assassination of J.F. Kennedy. I remember hearing about that American death on the national radio on a transistor as I gathered with others around a tray of donuts at school. At the time I was drinking hot chocolate. Steam from the mug rose in the air and I had a huge shiver. From that point I was cognizant of International, Cold War and American relations. I recognized that events could reach us all.
Where Camus came to me is that he was the first writer that I became aware of as a young man who emerged out of a colonial experience. His first large mystery was to ask and wonder why, how and for what end did his father go off one day to be a soldier, by order, and quickly die. Then, as it occurred in 1994, with his children publishing his unfinished novel of 1962 The Last Man, I asked, what actual succor did Camus draw from his formative life? It came down to sunshine and poverty. He had a sentence, the joy of poverty. In child terms that did mean a summer of swimming and play - not a clerical job in the hot season.What gave Camus pleasure, as an adult, was to recognize the bliss of literate autonomy as well as its duties of seriousness. I determined to seek out the Simone de Beauvoir preface, then, that she wrote for Violette Leduc writing about her mother (La Bâtarde. 1964) (English translation only available in this country at the local University). I read Mad in Pursuit (1971). The fresh caterwauls into history in this novel's style and content reminded me of the credentials of de Beauvoir 's ' Second Sex'. thesis(1949)(4) Leduc's story was made into a film in 2013, by Martin Provost. It is a biographical film about Leduc. It exhibited in the special presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. at the same year that I made a global release of my third film. Mine was on designers in videogames in Los Angles. Sensibilities and interests in culture have spread broadly due to several digital accelerations. I never took time to read The Second Sex, even at age twenty- five when I was given a copy, for, I rather sought out the ideas about existentialism via cinema first not literature alone, as soon as I got underway with school in 1975. Coming from ' business class' I only thought about ' struggle' in a virtualizing sense. I had so little experience of recognition of poverty, but I did know the power of fear and violent action. For example, I was witness to a Warf strike in Sydney in 1970, there, graphic and voluminous in sound and image - we , David and I , were only passing through ---. I knew that I had been protected inside the 'The Pastoral 'of my migrant stories - Kent and Essex style - myinherited country life, whilst the cities of the world were going to throw up the discourses of politics.
The time of the 'Bay of Pigs’ (1961) crisis it was only eight years before I married David Robinson and then set out to see the world. Years would grow where I could build my own critique of how, when and where there are dangers when insights get ' lost in translation'. (5) The horror to me was my monolingualism. It took the mid seventies for me to start receiving first books in translation from French about film. The women of my past families, just four generations back, were fluent in German, English and Italian, could perform or teach Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms or Chopin. I do not know what they read. At my high school, a boarding school for Presbyterian Girls, I had become very hungry for the rather charming ritual whereby the girls rotated around the dining table each week, so that once every sixth week or so, one was dedicated to make conversation at the dinner table with a staff member at table top. For me, this was at least a start, to start conversations with adults. This piece of luck was one of my first incentives to accept a leadership role at school and increase my ratio of being nearer head of table more often. At age sixteen I accepted to be a House Captain. This at least gave me some mileage in speaking and sharing abstracts of thought. Also, ideas of valour - all in hyperbole, of course. The school had just two houses.
The Myth of Sisyphus. 1955
Although the " Myth of Sisyphus poses moral problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and create, in the very midst of the desert.
Camus.
More references and notes on Camus
by Stephanie below
Summertime countryside. Canterbury. A break beside the Waiau River. 2022
Canterbury summer holiday 2022.
Notes on Camus 2025. Stephanie
If the world were clear, Art would not exist
Camus
2024
I have already admitted that my early lifetime was not a time to read Proust (Stephanie)Suddenly, a little more clarity comes here about him. One fragment from Camus describes him. Camus wrote‘Creating is living doubly. The groping anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collections of flowers, of wallpapers and of anxieties signify nothing else’ This was a creative person’s indulgence. Being with self.'
Camus phrases are like gold.‘Everything begins with lucid indifference’‘Describing - that is the last ambition of a lucid thought’
More exhilarating is snippets with which Camus applauds NietzscheHe cites Nietzsche,‘Art and nothing but art. We have art in order to not die of the truth’ (6)
Camus thinks of great novelists as philosophical novelists. They consider a work of Art both as an end and a beginning. Of love, fictional creation has the initial wonder and the fecund rumination. (7)
Camus puts great emphasis upon lucidity and in the recognition and acceptance of absurdity.
Camus wished to address suicide when he writes about the Myth of Sisyphus as he addressed murder in the long form essay The Rebel. 1951In 1955 he set out to address the Myth of Sisyphus as he put thought to what life was like for men in the 1940s.
Sisyphus. ‘He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him an unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth….. That hour, …. (when he goes down to the plain to the stone) is his hour of consciousness’(120/121)
He wrote‘Although ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and create, in the very midst of the desert’
About Kafka, Camus wrote‘The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.’
Camus phrases are like gold.‘Everything begins with lucid indifference’‘Describing - that is the last ambition of a lucid thought’
More exhilarating is snippets with which Camus applauds NietzscheHe cites Nietzsche,‘Art and nothing but art. We have art in order to not die of the truth’ (6)
Camus thinks of great novelists as philosophical novelists. They consider a work of Art both as an end and a beginning. Of love, fictional creation has the initial wonder and the fecund rumination. (7)
Camus puts great emphasis upon lucidity and in the recognition and acceptance of absurdity.
Camus wished to address suicide when he writes about the Myth of Sisyphus as he addressed murder in the long form essay The Rebel. 1951In 1955 he set out to address the Myth of Sisyphus as he put thought to what life was like for men in the 1940s.
Sisyphus. ‘He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him an unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth….. That hour, …. (when he goes down to the plain to the stone) is his hour of consciousness’(120/121)
He wrote‘Although ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and create, in the very midst of the desert’
About Kafka, Camus wrote‘The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.’