Finally, in Camus, who made the most immense journey from his origins, I found someone who stated, in the most affirmative and human terms, the ways in which he remained dependent on them. This understanding did not come painlessly but eventually, in a sentiment that is wholly alien to the likes of Osborne, he achieved “something priceless: a heart free of bitterness.”
That is why I came here [Algiers]: to claim kin with him, to be guided by him.
I walk toward the sea and never quite come to it. Always you are separated from the sea by an expanse of one thing or another: docks or roads. No trace of the plage de l’Arsenal where Camus glimpsed for the first time the beauty of the Mediterranean. Now there are only the all-consuming docks. Gradually the sky becomes stained with clouds. The call to prayer comes over a loudspeaker, distorted and mechanical, like a factory whistle ordering the next shift to work.
Eventually I come to a stretch of land—I don’t know what else to call it—by the sea. It is not part of the port but, although the sea laps against an area of sand, it is not a beach. This is sand in the building-site sense of the word. There is rubble and rubbish everywhere. Rush-hour clouds are queuing across the sky.
Matthew Arnold, staring out at the Channel, thought of Sophocles and the sea of faith that had since receded. I think of Camus and the beauty that each year is pushed further and further out into the oil-filmed sea. As the waves lap in I detect a note of weariness in the endlessly repeated motion. Perhaps the sea never crashed vigorously here but it is difficult not to think some vital force has been sucked from it.
Camus concludes his famous study of absurdity by saying we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Easier to imagine him here, thinking “Is it worth it?” for if he rolled his rock up this slope he would come to a heap of rubbish—and when it rolled back it would end up in another even bigger heap. Easier to imagine Sisyphus looking forward to the cigarette that will make his lungs heave under the effort of work and which, when he has tossed away the butt, will add to the rubbish below. But perhaps there is consolation even in this: the higher the mound of rubbish the less distance to heave his rock—until there is no hill to climb, just a level expanse of trash. This is progress.
As I continue walking the sun bursts out again, making the bank of cloud smolder green-black, luminous over the sea. Perched be-tween the road and the sea, between sun and cloud, some boys are playing football in a prairie blaze of light. The pitch glows the color of rust. The ball is kicked high and all the potential of these young lives is concentrated on it. As the ball hangs there, moon-white against the wall of cloud, everything in the world seems briefly up for grabs and I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.