I tried reading Myth of Sisyphus by Camus recently. I found it tedious and boring. Sort of a rehash of stoic and Taoist teaching. Yes embrace the absurd but sooo long winded. Has anyone else read this, am I missing something?
It is very methodical. Starting out on why you shouldn't kill yourself, as a real debate. And yes all the arguments have been made before. He tries to build up from first principals. I think he tried to walk a fine line between the physical suicide and the philosophical suicide.
The Stranger is good, but I have trouble stick with his other works past the first few chapters because of the tedious and boring aspects you mentioned.
I was never a fan of French literature to begin with, so that might have something to do with it.
He will hereafter be known (and forgotten) not for what he is, but for the picture that a hurried journalist has given of him. To make a name for oneself in the literary world, it is no longer necessary to write many books. It suffices to have written one that the evening newspapers have talked about and on which the writer’s reputation will henceforth rest.
Ah, the days of morning and evening newspapers... A foreign country, they do things differently there.
(I also find fascinating those early XX century English letters/bios where Londoners send invitations by mail in the morning and get replies after lunch. Take that WhatsApp )
Fascinating in more than one way: I don’t think I’ve ever seen mail delivered on the same day within the same city even when my place of residence had a well-functioning postal service by modern standards. (What I have seen in a particularly egregious case, though, is letters reliably taking a month to traverse a distance that takes me half an hour on foot.)
I've been told that it was once common in the UK to be able to send an early morning letter and have a reply in your letter box by afternoon. Now, I have Post Office workers graffitiing envelopes and changing the type of postage I just paid for once I've left the Post Office, letters going missing regularly, a couple of stamps costs £10, and first class can take a week. It's now got so bad that we hand delivered cards over Christmas.
There's nothing surprising about that. Human experience transferred through the ages has been lost to automation and profit-seeking via workforce-reduction. The machine/algorithm may have 80% of the human expertise of railway/post operators, but it's lost the last 20% that made operations seamless.
And it's certainly made work more tedious and painful, which does not exactly lead to better outcomes in the long run. I would certainly recommend reading « La mécanique des lettres » on this topic, but unfortunately i can't find an english translation.
Even in the day when all communications were slower by post or hand delivered messages, George Eliot wrote a joke about people not responding quick enough in Middlemarch "The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over the present quickening in the general pace of things..."
I was never a fan of French literature to begin with, so that might have something to do with it.
He will hereafter be known (and forgotten) not for what he is, but for the picture that a hurried journalist has given of him. To make a name for oneself in the literary world, it is no longer necessary to write many books. It suffices to have written one that the evening newspapers have talked about and on which the writer’s reputation will henceforth rest.
Ah, the days of morning and evening newspapers... A foreign country, they do things differently there.
(I also find fascinating those early XX century English letters/bios where Londoners send invitations by mail in the morning and get replies after lunch. Take that WhatsApp )
Absolutely pitiful.
And it's certainly made work more tedious and painful, which does not exactly lead to better outcomes in the long run. I would certainly recommend reading « La mécanique des lettres » on this topic, but unfortunately i can't find an english translation.