Hello Blog, Remember Me?

Merry Christmas to all of you who haven't heard from me in three months.  I am a Slacker.  I feel like I am at a bloggers anonymous meeting.

Sunday the made up word of the week in the New York Times magazine was "exhaustence" ... otherwise known as the life of an overworked individual.  Not only have I been uninterested in blogging, I have hardly read anything.  The book I will review below was due on November 15.  I did squeeze in the December book club's reading but since it was to be at my house, and I could make the selection, I picked Miller's play The Price, figuring everyone else would have as little time during the holidays to read as I did.  Anyway, a snow storm cancelled the club so who knows if anyone but Pat read it besides me.

On the a review, how novel.  Except I read nonfiction ... Brave Genius by Sean Carroll.  It's the intersecting lives of Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, both Nobel Prize winners and both active in the French Resistance.  It is a fantastic book, scholarly, well written, 504 pages long and thought provoking.  It is only that last characteristic that I want to address, and use it as a prelude to whatever books I have time to read in 2014.

Camus wrote for underground newspapers during the War, urging his fellow French citizens to oppose the Vichy regime and bring back national pride.  He was writing under an alias, of course, and after the war wrote under his own name.  As much as I detest the political bent of every newspaper published today, I was struck by an ideal Camus espoused, urging his colleagues "to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to restore the country its authoritative voice ... see to it that voice remains one of vigor rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity."  Furthermore, for Camus, a writer's responsibility was to unite the greatest number of people, not to compromise his art by serving those in power who make history.

I'll admit, I haven't read anything by Camus, and they will be on my 2014 list, having already ordered a few from Alibris.  He appeals to my sense of challenging the imposed what is when he asks "What is a rebel?  It is first of all, a man who says no ... What does he mean by saying no?  He means, for example, that things are hard enough, there are limits beyond which one cannot pass, up to this point, yes, beyond it no or you are going too far."  Carroll interprets this quote "that by saying no, the rebel is in turn affirming that there are limits beyond which his rights are infringed upon.  There is thus something to be preserved, something of value, on one side of the limit.  Moreover, these limits and rights belong not just to the rebel but also to others.  In the act of refusal, the rebel thereby defines a value ... that transcends the individual, which removes him from his solitude and joins him to others."

There are other lengthy quotes from The Myth of Sisyphus that I would include here, but since that is one of the books I have ordered, I will defer and close by saying how "apt" the opening quotes Carroll selected for each chapter are.  When alternating chapters and writing about Monod, he introduces a quote from A. N Whitehead: "In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory."  And from an unknown source, bringing me back to my exhaustence, "Two things rob people of their peace of mind - work unfinished and work not yet begun."  I am sure 2014 will keep me continuously suspended between these two poles of obligations, but hopefully will not freeze my need to write as much as the fall of 2013.