Le Grand Fossard, Villeblevin, France. Mid-winter vacation. January 4, 1960. Two men riding in a Facel Vega car , the unusual French competitor to the Mercedes SL or Aston Martin DB5, were driving back to Paris from north-central of France. The road seems in every way ordinary. But on their way it begins to rain. Not to heavily, but enough to make the road slippery. Suddenly the car skids, spins off the road, and crashes to a tree. The man in the passenger seat killed instantly while the driver died three days later in a hospital.
This kind of accident, happening to a person or persons unknown, is reported everyday in the papers. It has become part of the banality of our modern environment. But when the man killed is Albert Camus, one of France's leading literary figures, the youngest recipient of Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 43 and at the peak of his powers, we call this death absurd. Perhaps there is no greater absurdity here. For chance, which dictates our mortality so casually, one death is an indifferent fact likes any other. Yet we persist in counting one man’s death as different with another. “I call this death shameful.” Jean Paul Sartre wrote in his eulogy the next day. He had been a close friend to Camus, and later became a bitter rival; but he buried past differences to deliver a moving assessment of what Camus had come to mean to his time. “He was one of the very few in our day,” Sartre said, “who seemed to be seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. After all that toil of the spirit, to be coming near the end of a narrow tunnel, and then to be snuffed out-It’s absurd!” Camus might have replied, “that this is precisely the absurdity of our condition: that we go on demanding that our human meanings, in this case to get to the end of the tunnel, ought to escape the indifference of fate.”
The irony became glimmer when later an unused railway ticket was found in Camus pocket. He had been planning to take the train, but at the last moment his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard (the driver) had convinced him that it would be a better trip by car.
Shameful or not, the accident seems almost like an illustration from some of his early works on the absurd. Life, when it imitates art, is usually uninventive and sometimes tragic. On the other hand, for a man who had clearly faced the question whether human life was meaningless, this was an appropriate death.
References:
Barrett, William, Time of Need Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century
Hawes, Elizabeth, CAMUS, A Romance
Albert Camus, Wikipedia
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