On Camus, Language & reaching 2600 ...

Reading Camus is a zen process as his writing is spare, direct and disciplined. One is with the arrow when reading his work as his take on reality and life is that of wary positiveness & dry humor that also comes equipped with enormous cost as per his Myth of Sisyphus essay where the never ending process of pushing the rock up the hill is obviously absurd yet remains a worthwhile endeavor when facing the enormity of an existence we will never fully understand. For Camus, the role of the artist is to educate and inform on the human condition no matter what the cost may be, an act fraught with danger and uncertainty when the creative act exposes the inner most feelings of the individual in question creating the art.

An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence. In the midst of such din the writer cannot hope to remain aloof in order to pursue the reflections and images that are dear to him. Until the present moment, remaining aloof has always been possible in history. When someone did not approve, he could always keep silent or talk of something else. Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications. The moment that abstaining from choice is itself looked upon as a choice and punished or praised as such, the artist is willy-nilly impressed into service. “Impressed” seems to me a more accurate term in this connection than “committed.” Instead of signing up, indeed, for voluntary service, the artist does his compulsory service.

It is easy to see all that art can lose from such a constant obligation. Ease, to begin with, and that divine liberty so apparent in the work of Mozart. It is easier to understand why our works of art have a drawn, set look and why they collapse so suddenly. It is obvious why we have more journalists than creative writers, more boy-scouts of painting than Cézanne's, and why sentimental tales or detective novels have taken the place of War and Peace or The Charterhouse of Parma.

For yours truly, language shapes one's view of reality and different languages cause man to view reality keyed to the specifics of that given language. When reading Camus in French, the poetic clarity of his thought process comes through undistilled as translation, no matter how good, is never a 1 to 1 process but rather an approximate mapping of one language into another. When reading about the Sapir -Whorf hypothesis, this relativistic approach to language rings true, especially when the syntax of one language differs drastically from the other, i.e. English to Chinese or interestingly enough, Chinese to Japanese where the pictographic (Mandarin/Kanji) alphabet is largely the same while the spoken language of each country is anything but.

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined to include two versions. The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories, whereas the weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.

And this ...

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible. - Camus

On reaching 2600, in conjunction with Camus and language, is a good thing without question. :)