A Review: Personal Writings
Title of Work: Personal Writings
Author: Albert Camus
Format: #essay paperback
Published: 2020
Started: 2024-12-01
Finished: 2025-01-19\
Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 4/5
A light rain in Sevilla wets cobbled streets and I mourn three artists this morning. I mourn the diffusion of three great lights, local sources burning out but waves of their brilliance expanding, propagating out and out to meet me here. I fold time and bring each into entanglement with my own knotted node on the great net spanning all ways, a moment or a lightyear depending how you lay it out. I gathered these distant strands to exist simultaneously within me this morning and their distinct forms convolute and form a chord as joyful to the ear as it is sorrowful to the soul. They ring of deep, aching pain and a grand, celestial beauty that exists for all to enjoy if one only takes the time to gaze into a ceiling of velveteen darkness which is held, tacked aloft by pins of ancient light.
Each of their deaths feels tragic in some way. Like we hadn’t learned everything we stood to learn from them yet. They hadn’t given all that they hoped to share with us. But I am thankful that their works live on and, in some way, I feel I can know them through what they left behind. Their voices rush past with startling momentum and my eyes and ears strain to hold on while they charge past. I want to contain them in circuits networked between the lobes of my brain as long as I can sustain it.
I’m trying to be more diaristic (almost said “diaretic”/diuretic! hopefully not pee inducing) with my writing. I want to capture something true then move on. I want to be less self-conscious about making things that are good so I can spend more time making things exist. I keep drawing people and buildings though they mock me flatly from the page. I haven’t learned how to make them stand up yet. A candle burning all night in a broken whisky bottle left drips and towers of wax on a cellar table made from the thick slab of an old tree. It is rendered as a mass of black scribbles. It doesn’t flicker and bleed as I know it did then. I keep writing though I usually find I haven’t said anything, only left marks. Mostly jotted observations in my pocket notebooks and thoughts about what I’m reading or watching. With time, maybe, I’ll be able to make out the message.
Certain folks and the art they shared with the world make me feel like I can make beautiful things too. They speak to desires and fears and dreams whose writhing I can detect sometimes emanating from deep down, somewhere near the core, but which haven’t found their paths to expression yet. Believe me that I’m seeking a way in toward these hidden caverns constantly. If I can find a way down to the shrouded center I suspect I can pass through to something else entirely. I’ll bring back as much as I can carry.
Malcolm James McCormick (1992–2018)
David Keith Lynch (1946–2025)
Albert Camus (1913–1960)
Mac “Yeah, somebody died today, I I saw his picture in the funny papers Didn’t think anybody died on a Friday Some angry banker, some kind of money trader Recently divorced, was drunk drivin’ down the highway And drove off the bridge to his wedding song Blew out the bass in his speakers, you can still hear the treble goin'”
“The moon’s wide awake, with a smile on his face As he smuggle constellations in his suitcase”
“Let’s go and travel through the unknown”
Honorable mention: “If you sleeping on my shit then ima dookie on your mattress” lol
Lynch ![[Pasted image 20250120151256.png]]
![[Pasted image 20250120151216.png]]
“This weekend I’m going to try to find out if I’m connected to the moon.” “I’m pretty sure I’m connected to the moon”
“Find something that will whisper the full value of life.”
“Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new.”
Camus “… I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”
“…it seems to me that the very act of caressing and describing my delight will ensure that it has no end. There is a time for living and a time for giving expression to life.”
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”