Yes of course he was a young man when he wrote “The Myth of Sisyphus’ with its deep pondering on the Absurd. Olivier Todd in his biography is kind about this and offers a few quotations from letters and his journals about the whole topic without deconstruction. “The human cry and the world’s unreasoning silence”, ‘feeling inside yourself happiness and reason’.
However truth is a thing. It is what it is. Our nature wants to conform or have the world conform to what is right and just. There are human needs. Camus was sick and therefore could not serve in the army but there was something he could do. The absurd was an affectation when there was a situation that you had to fight. Evil is privative, an emptiness that must be opposed by a presence: a truth against a lie. That the truth cannot be expressed does not make it absurd. His editorship of ‘Combat’ the resistance paper was an important part of the fight against the Boche. He took a stand. Something does matter after all.
