No to philosophical suicide. Yes to dissonance in the extreme.

How did I get here? Serendipity. On a bookshelf in my office is a pewter statue of Sisyphus rolling his ball up the infamous hill. It was to commemorate my retirement from one work life and the entering of another with unforeseen successes and failures. The eternal struggle between efforting and finding meaning. So I was intrigued when first my partner’s father lent me a book he’d finished of Camus’s which I soon after discovered I’d already had/read another translation. But that got me thinking about this author some and reviewing my notes in The Stranger (my copy, The Outsider is the other translation’s title) and also in The Fall. Then an amazon search showed me this title and so I couldn’t pass it up. And I’m so glad I didn’t.

Camus is often quoted as saying - when one speaks of Camus of philosophy when questioning why people take their own lives - “the only philosophical question worth asking is whether or not to commit suicide.” That is how I heard it. It is somewhat along those lines for sure, “There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

And while the question of physical/actual suicide is addressed herein, this essay is more interested in philosophical suicide which Camus defines as taking the leap into the eternal through hope that there is something beyond this life and that it therefore has meaning.

I found this work remarkable and feel it may shape my outlook and inner landscape for some time to come. Particularly helpful at this time are the descriptions of the artist’s inner life in conflict with the outer world, the meeting of the two, the necessity of conflict to remain unblemished by the nostalgia of human tendency to give up engaging with the basic and unanswerable questions.