Camus' Spark

IIn Qatar, I started to read a book  by Albert Marquette about Albert Camus. Picking it back up again in Kansas, I started from the beginning, and I'm seeing him from a completely different perspective. I've read a lot of his work, but not a lot about him. 

I didn't realize that he was an atheist. He's a unique type of atheist though. There's a difference between someone who refuses to believe in God and one who factually believes God does not exist. It turns out that Camus refused to believe in a higher power out of rebellion, not because he disbelieved per se'. (If that makes sense...) 

I think Camus was really angry with God, at what many of us perceive is a divine tolerance of chaos and widespread suffering in the world. If there was a divine being armed with omnipotent power and ultimate will, how could he or she allow life to unfold without apparent meaning and impotently observe the relentless advance of pain? It indicates either a lack of existence or an ultimate negligence. 

This lack of meaning, this sweeping absurdity, was completely intolerable to Camus. Regardless of divine reality, he determined to rebel against this. To hold the line against despair and suicide, he developed his entire philosophy on the premise the very fact he could understand that he existed meant it was worthwhile to live rather than not. This realization gave birth to hope, and thus to  recovery of meaning. 

The way I understand it, and the fact that he understood there was no apparent purpose to life, was purpose enough to actually keep on living. The irony was his realization was founded upon a profound absurdity. Camus saw that to live was to be absurd, so in a way, absurdity was a fundamental part of being alive. Although, I think what he meant was the struggle between an internal desire to live and the external pointlessness (characterized by suffering and the terrible ennui of the mundane), this battle was in itself was absurd. It was  an illusion. The fact that he could see this from a third point of view meant that it was worth living, even if living was absurd.

His ideas seem almost contradictory, a strange mixture of existential anguish, sisyphean despair, and tangential optimism. But, since his quotes and his thinking consistently return to an adamant and rigorous defense of hope and light, I believe the power of his message is more contained in the man. 

The more I read, the more I am convinced his writing must be interpreted in the context of his being and by examining the record of his daily life. Life is ultimately absurd, but since we have the capacity to understand this, we have the responsibility to act. It is our choices, our daily steps that unfold a path of hope which leads to the creation of meaning. 

If there is a spark, there is always the possibility of an "invincible summer". I say, there is always a spark. We just have to look for it, and then choose and protect it. First in ourselves, then in others. Once we act, what happens next is similar to the creation of the universe... A single atom, a catalyst, then an incredible explosion of energy and beauty, the big bang.

Still, it all starts with a small spark buried within a deep darkness. Upon recognition of external absurdity and apparent insignificance, if the spark retains a sense of intrinsic value simply because it exists, then a existential coup occurs as the absurd is transcended into sublimity. It is like a paradox... What I would call a metaphysical tesseract. Time and space, absurdity and chaos bend and in the crack between, a subtle door opens into a quiet garden where flowers grow in the midst of winter.

It's a beautiful idea, and I think Camus would agree with me.