Albert Camusthe rebel of the absurd

He said later that everything he knew about morality he learned from football — you learn that the ball never arrives from where you expect it, and you learn it with ten other people depending on you. He grew up poor in Algiers, raised by a mother who was partially deaf and could not read, in a flat with no books in it.

He objected to being filed under existentialism, publicly and often, and fell out with Sartre over it in print. He objected to being called a philosopher at all. We have filed him under philosophy anyway, which he would have hated, and which the note pinned to the wall at /philosophers admits.

He won the Nobel at 44 — the second-youngest ever — and died two years later in a car crash on a straight, empty road. There was an unused train ticket in his pocket. He had meant to take the train.

“In the depths of winter, I found within me an invincible summer.”

Albert Camus