Mutant fingers

The Stranger by Albert Camus | Camus’s absurdism and the contemplation of death

Inspired by Helen Yentus’s book cover design.

Life could be as simple as a detour to Mister Softee. It was.

Then, at some curious discovery of a grape-sized development under the nipple (ladies, you get it), life would become a desperate beeline away from your middle-school equivalent to Regina George’s Burn Book.

A few pubescence months later, that boy behind you in Chemistry class would make a conscious choice to pluck a strand of your hair and lick it. You would dramatically get on your prudish high horse and reprimand him for being a pervert, only to find yourself slightly intrigued. Of course, you wouldn’t have the faintest idea (yet) that such a fine line between disgust and arousal only gets finer in time. Alas, the tedious beginnings of your budding sexuality; one that’d consume the entirety of your little brain until you realise just how little you are, not to mention your brain.

You’d get to this realisation at some random beach party. A Scottish guy on exchange would grab handfuls of sand, let it slip through the cracks between his fingers, palms, and stare at you with the utmost intensity. He would do it again and again and in the midst of this gestural performance (how millennials court), your instincts would tell you to run away from this psycho, but then he’d redirect his gaze to the stars and moot: “Y’ken, thare ur mair stars than grains o’sand in th’world?” (my caricatures will have me cancelled). Before you know it, you‘d have written a dissertation on Thus Spoke Zarathustra and identify as Übermensch. But you’re not Nietzsche so you’d suck at it; you could barely Übermensch your way out of bed. Instead, you’d find some form of solace parading someone else’s ideology at house parties like you know a thing or two.

A few years later, you’d forget about profundities and inadvertently find yourself pivot tabling the pivoting hell out of Excel, amusing yourself with the thought of Ross screaming: “Pivot! Pivot! PIVOT!” You’d giggle at your desk. Your boss would glare at you. You’d contemplate the dire lack of zeros in your bank account. You’d pivot in silence.

I know, I know, I’m getting there.

At some haphazard point in life, sunrise Mysore classes would become appealing. Your Ashtanga instructor would tell you to direct your drishti to your toes for the nth time. In the name of om-s and shanti-s, you’d follow suit and convince yourself of yogic nirvana until your monkey brain would decide to ruminate on just how insanely weird your toes are… Why are they mutant fingers? At that essential moment (a single thought that’d lead to a rabbit hole of all concepts rendered insubstantial), as though Camus had possessed you, nothing would make sense anymore. Huh, strange—would be your response to things, anything, everything.

Okay, we’re here. That was my calloused rendition of how one might begin to dabble with the concept of absurdity; when all meanings fall apart.

Camus’s absurdism, against existentialism and nihilism

Camus’s absurdism begins with the contemplation of strangeness or the meaninglessness of it all. In the recognition of the absurd, one can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic. But unlike Nietzsche’s glamourous feat to combat the meaninglessness with “artistic” fabrication, Camus is more of a pacifist when it comes to the human war against the strangeness of existence.