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Among the tanned youthful bodies on the beach at Algiers, he accepts the natural renewal that argues against myths and fickle gods: "One can find a certain moderation as well as a constant excess in the strained and violent faces of these people, in this summer sky emptied of tenderness, beneath which all truths can be told and on which no deceitful divinity has traced the signs of hope or redemption. Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion—only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch." However, Camus' quest for a lucid, objective ethic for man never allowed him more than a temporary relief in the stones, flesh and stars of touchable truths.
Quivering Wings. In the fierce wind at Djémila, he finds the natural renewal that defies the despair leading to suicide: "The violent bath of sun and wind drained me of all strength. I scarcely felt the quivering of wings inside me, life's complaint, the wea' rebellion of the mind. Soon, scattered to the four corners of the earth, self-forgetful and self-forgotten, I am the wind and within it, the columns and the archway, the flagstones warm to the touch, the pale mountains around the deserted city. And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world." Yet, despite this lyrical sensualism, it was Camus' beiief in an intellectual revolt (after facing "the absurd") that most renewed and sustained his bat tle against the "quivering wings" of a suicidal death.
Rounding out this volume are Camus' critical essays, including those on Sartre, Ignazio Silone, Melville, Gide and Faulkner, and three interviews that he gave over the years. In one of these interviews, he was asked what compliment most annoyed him. He replied: "Honesty, conscience, humanity—you know, all the modern mouthwasnes." Yet, these qualities best describe the man who struggled so ardently to understand what it was to be simply a man.