What Bush could learn from Camus

 

I learned by reading Andrew Sullivan that Bush is reading L'Etranger, (The Stranger), which is of course one of the masterpieces of Albert Camus, the Nobel peace prize for Literature in 1957. I think that there are a few lessons that he could learn just by reading the foreword, which Camus wrote for the first American edition of the book and there are found in the following paragraph:

[...] some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least one much closer to the author's intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn't play the game. The reply is a simple one; he refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what isn't true. It is also and above all, to say more than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels. This is what we all do, every day, to simplify life.[..]For me, therefore, Meursault is not a piece of social wreckage, but a poor and naked man enamored of a sun that leaves no shadows. Far from being bereft of all feeling, he is animated by a passion that is deep because it is stubborn, a passion for the absolute and for truth. This truth is still a negative one, the truth of what we are and what we feel, but without it no conquest of ourselves or of the world will ever be possible.