Camus:

○ La religion:

○ Le suicide:

○ La révolte ou la passion: Find something to rebel against, give yourself

meaning. Find something you are passionate about, give meaning and sense to

your life

○ Camus was against the first two, called it the cowards way out

● Sartre: absurdity

○ liberty of choices gives anxiety

Essentialism: Essence comes before life

Nihilism: No god, Life has no meaning

Response to essentialism

Existentialism: It’s up to us to give life meaning

Response to nihilism

Notes - This be the Verse

This Be The Verse Poem Summary and Analysis | LitCharts

● Suggests that all parents inevitably cause their children lasting emotional damage.

This, the speaker suggests, is unavoidable.

○ Unavoidable like

● Seeing this process as a never-ending cycle, the speaker suggests that parents tend to

“fuck up” their children precisely because their parents did the same thing to them. In

this regard, the poem frames emotional damage as cyclical and generational,
 something that people can’t help but inherit from their parents and then unwittingly

inflict upon their own children.

○ Unavoidable

● The only way to break out of this endless sequence of emotional damage is to die

without having children, thereby making it impossible to pass emotional baggage on to

a new generation of family members.

● the speaker’s solution to the never-ending problem of human misery is that people

should “get out” of life

● In turn, the poem suggests that there is virtually nothing a person can do to prevent

unhappiness.

○ Nihilism

● *According to the speaker, to be alive is to be miserable. This, of course, is because

parents pass on their discontent to their children, and this discontent “deepens like a

coastal shelf” as time goes on and generation after generation inherits such misery.

○ More nihilism

● With this dynamic in mind, it becomes clear that the speaker doesn’t truly know how to

avoid misery because there isn’t a way to do this. By suggesting such a ludicrous way

of putting an end to this kind of happiness, then, the speaker subtly demonstrates that

humans have no choice but to accept suffering as a basic fact of existence.

Parallels can be drawn between Larke and Camus’ views on the world

● Cyclical

● Unavoidable

Shift from existentialism to nihilism from first two stanzas to last

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin - Poem Analysis

The Analysis of Philip Larkin’s Poem "This Be The Verse".

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin - Poem Analysis

Notes - Camus

● Does not believe in God

● “What might happen to a character who comes to realize that there is no Divinity, no

God. What happens when he realizes that his death is final, that his joys, his

disappointments, and his sufferings are brief flickers preluding an afterlife of

nothingness?”

○ What changes in his daily pattern of work-eat-love-sleep must he now effect?

● Only because he is a part of a meaningless birth-death cycle is he doomed; the fact of

death and his mortality is all.

● So, what then? Suicide, if all is meaningless? Or a blind return flight toward an external,

though ever-silent, God?

● This concern with death and its abyss of nonexistence is the basis for most of Camus'

literary works.

● The fictional characters, therefore, who shoulder their new mortal responsibility, are

often characterized as rebels. In revolt from both a cowardly suicide and an equally

cowardly faith flight

● Knowing that man has only man to depend upon, however, he can take fresh courage.

He is now rid of fearful superstitions and questioning theories; he can now discard the

religious faiths which assume man is subservient to a Something divine and eternal.

○ Knowing that man has only man to depend upon, however, he can take fresh

courage. He is now rid of fearful superstitions and questioning theories; he can

now discard the religious faiths which assume man is subservient to a

Something divine and eternal.

○ Personal responsibility

● Camus challenges man to do the work which he has hitherto assigned to God.
Albert Camus: The Absurd. A look into Philosophy’s suicidal… | by The Editor | Strawm*n |

Medium

Camus response to absurd - Eddusaver

Camus and Absurdity | Philosophy Talk

Sartre on Camus’ Concept Of The Absurd | by Thomas Dylan Daniel | Serious Philosophy |

Medium

Albert Camus: Philosophical Suicide, Physical Suicide, and the Absurd | by The Editor |

Strawm*n | Medium

Life is Absurd! Exploring Albert Camus’ Rebellious Philosophy (thecollector.com)