We left Albert Camus as he was dispensing of all the leap-takers — the philosophers who, instead of bearing the weight of existence on their own, found some shortcut to assist them (I’m referring to the previous post, if you missed it). The most frequent of Camus’s targets here was Kierkegaard, who was reportedly a [...]
Posts Tagged ‘steppenwolf’
The Only Truly Serious Philosophical Problem
“Even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.” Albert Camus clearly felt no need for an element of surprise in The Myth of Sisyphus, his long essay that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. This statement appears in the first paragraph of the Preface, before the book even officially [...]
Henry Miller: Prototype For a New Kind of Protest
In the introduction to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, C.M. Woodhouse points out (in a 1954 London Times Literary Supplement) that, in Orwell’s criticism of other authors, “his recurrent theme was their failure to protest against the world they lived in. This is the whole burden of his longest and most serious piece of literary criticism, [...]
For Madmen Only!
After finishing Steppenwolf, I have to say that it might be the densest 218-page book ever written. Not dense as in unenjoyable, but dense as in containing an incredible amount of useful information and quotable statements. However, thanks to Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider, I had distorted expectations going into Steppenwolf. For some reason I [...]
