The Complete Notebooks of Albert Camus, trans. by Ryan Bloom, Chicago University Press, £36

The village was about an hour from Marseille, but there was only one bus, which would take much longer. I boarded it early in the morning, and slept some of the way, changing in Aix-en-Provence. When the bus dropped me off on the outskirts of Lourmarin, I watched it disappear up the road, until all I could hear were cicadas and the undergrowth ticking in the heat.

The place where Albert Camus is buried looks like an ancient ruin. Crumbling stone and cypress trees enclose the cemetery, which is surrounded by green Provençal hillsides. I found it easily enough. The grave itself was a modest affair, with an Oleander blooming pink and green planted on top. He lies next to his wife, Francine.

Visiting graves is a largely pointless endeavour. One expects some sort of moment to occur; a profound realisation of something elusive. But there is invariably nothing but a headstone. And, in this regard, Camus’ grave was no different. Even so, as I looked around at the ancient beauty of the landscape, and felt the warmth of the sun, I couldn’t help but feel the serenity one always feels when looking out to sea from a balcony, or looking down at the clouds from the window of a plane.

Like many readers, I came to Camus young, during a period of apprehension. His works appeal to young people, I believe, because they provide relief from the most pressing of life’s questions, without resorting to evasion or self-deceit. Camus believed that the essential purposelessness of existence didn’t mean acquiescing to nihilism. Instead, it was an opportunity to rebel against life’s absurdity, by living authentically and passionately. He believed in staring the world in the face, and appreciating it for all its strangeness and beauty, even, and especially, in the absence of some grand unifying purpose, deity or ideology.

In The Complete Notebooks of Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom, we find what the philosopher Jonathan Rée termed ‘a philosophy of sunshine’.

Indeed, the sun is an inescapable presence in Camus’ notebooks, many entries beginning with rhapsodic descriptions of the sun, light and shadow, and the natural world.

For Camus, the sun is a symbolic constant, representing both the world’s apathy towards human existence, as well as its natural beauty and capacity to offer joy and experience. The paradox this binary involves is deliberate: Camus regarded the absurdity of existence not as a source of despair, but as a fact of life, which – once accepted – intensifies one’s love of life. In 1936, he writes:

Is it not true that I am suf­fering, and that this suffering intoxicates me, because it’s this sun and those shadows, this warmth and that coldness felt far off in the distance, hidden deep inside the air? Am I really going to let myself wonder whether something is dying, whether men are suffering, when everything is written here in this window through which the heavens pour out their plenty?

Camus never offered us a comprehensive philosophy: but this was precisely the point. While it is natural to want to see a greater purpose in the world, this, at best, involves lying to oneself about what that purpose is. Lying to oneself in this manner – even with benevolent intent – can have disastrous political consequences.

In 1945, he wrote:

The idea of messianism is at the root of all fanaticism. Messianism in exchange for man. Greek thinking is not historical. The values are preexistent. Against modern existentialism.

Camus’ aversion to utopianism was the hatchet that would eventually split his relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre cleanly in two. Although on the surface it looked like (and was) a political disagreement over the crimes of Stalinism, in truth their divergence was philosophical. Above all, Sartre believed that people were free to determine their own nature; that existence preceded essence. Camus – as the above entry demonstrates – did not believe existence preceded essence. He believed in ‘preexistent’ human values – presumably justice, decency, liberty, beauty – which made political violence for the sake of collective freedom a violation of human dignity.

Bloom’s footnotes also provide detail on how strained Camus’ relationship with Sartre became. He notes that around 1951, following the publication of The Rebel, Camus gave a copy of the book to Sartre, inscribed with a friendly message to him and Simone De Beauvoir. Not only did Sartre’s magazine not publish a review of The Rebel, but Sartre reinscribed the copy and gave it away to someone else.

Despite his public image as the debonair blade of French philosophy, Camus was beset with doubt and anxiety. He refers to his nervousness about travel in an entry in which he departs for America in 1946, saying ‘the bit of anxiety that accompanies all departures has passed’. In 1957, Camus complains of having panic attacks, and goes several months between December and early March of the following year without writing more than a line in his notebook.

He was also ill at ease as a writer. In a footnote to one entry, Camus once wrote to the writer Jean Grenier – who’d recently sent Camus unfavourable feedback on his novel A Happy Death – asking: ‘Do you really think I should keep writing? Asking myself that question fills me with anxiety.’ There’s something reassuring – especially for aspiring writers – about reading highly respected writers doubt their own abilities. It reminds us that behind the reputational façade of almost every famous author lurks a nervous mind, fretting about the opinions of others.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, Bloom finds Camus apparently doctoring his notebooks – presumably in the knowledge that they’d one day be pored over by critics and scholars – to make his political views appear more consistent than they actually were. In his introduction, Bloom reminds readers that Camus originally wrote his notes in longhand, but later had them typed. In an entry which originally included the line ‘I come to communism’, Camus appears to have amended this to read ‘I reject communism’, in the typed version.

Like all great academic editions, Ryan Bloom’s The Complete Notebooks is not merely a catalogue of Camus’ private writings: it is a fascinating network map of Camus’ life, work and ideas.