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THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER, Blaise Pascal, famously stated in his Pensées, «Toutes les difficultés de l'homme viennent de son incapacité à s'asseoir tranquillement dans une pièce en sa seule compagnie.» (“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”) Indeed, the themes of silence and solitude have both fascinated and frustrated many eminent philosophers and artists alike, not least French-Algerian, Noble Prize-winning writer, Albert Camus.
Camus is associated with the Existentialist philosophers, who essentially surmised that life is absurd and devoid of meaning and, as such, the only metaphysical question we should ask ourselves is whether or not life is worth living. And yet, unlike his counterparts, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, who had more pessimistic worldviews, Camus believed that not only must we nobly endure our pain and suffering, in the manner of the Greek king, Sisyphus, but that we should, in fact, celebrate our existence, specifically through championing the ordinary—be it friendship, nature, food, sunshine, dancing, swimming, kissing, even football, which he revered above all else—as a means to triumphing over hopelessness, nihilism and despair. As his famous essay, "Summer in Algiers" ("L'été à Alger"), concludes: "If there is a sin against life, it consists not so much in despairing as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this one.”
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