Apart from being a great writer, Camus also was well known for being a womanizer. His first marriage ended in divorce as his ex-wife was a drug addict, and he married again in 1940 to Francine Faure. She was a brilliant woman, a mathematician and a pianist, who, like Camus, lost her father on a battlefield. Their first meeting in Algiers, evolved into a love, which gave birth to two kids. But Camus' parental issues and lack of understanding of what relationships are, turned him into an uncommitted man (basically a walking red flag), who decided that it would be more appropriate if the mother of his two children was like a sister to him. Camus boldly sometimes wrote several letters to different women at the same time, however the most important of his affairs was with Maria Casares, a Spanish actress who he met during the rehearsal of his play The Misunderstanding in 1944. For those who read his early works like The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), there was no wonder why since his reflections on Don Juanism could perfectly fit into his idea of love. Camus had severe relationship anarchy, which means that he was not bound to any set rules of traditional relationships, as in modern standard he would not be nearly considered as a monogamous person. “Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?” asked Camus, so he definitely had a quantity over quality policy when it comes to love. He says that Don Juan, though loves quickly, does it with the same great passion each time. In comparison with Sartre, Camus is said to have more profound relationships with women, as the affair with Casares was almost a public thing. People called them a perfect match, Maria was the Don Juana in women’s world, the female version of Camus, that’s why they catch a spark so quickly and had the longest affair. However, despite the fact that Francine bared with him for a long time, it partially affected her mental health due to which she was even hospitalized. Seeing his suicidal wife, along with other issues in his personal life, made Camus fell into depression, since his guilt was seen though his letters, where he claimed that he was moved by Francine’s generosity to forgive him for so many years.

A Crown of Laurel

Camus had a bright mind since his early school years, as he excelled in his studies. His family was a working class, living from paycheck to paycheck. So, because of his good grades and great potential, recognized by his biggest influence and his unofficial father Louis Germain, under whose tutelage he got a scholarship to a prestigious university. Unlike other French thinkers of that time, Camus was more invested in ancient Greeks, especially their aesthetics, while others fell under the steps of German philosophers like Husserl. But his only exception was Nietzsche, who had a similar interest to him and studied philology. It was a kind of a prologue to his breakthrough with absurdism, since fundamentals of the absurd lie within a nihilistic approach of nothingness - he learned that life has no meaning. However, though the roots are the same with a nihilist view, Camus’ absurd was rather against the nihilism “you can die right away and free yourself” view as he disregarded destructive behavior. Because, nihilistic anarchy is the contrast to absurdist rebel, as the latter means that first we must to understand the state of absurd we are held in his world which is indifferent to the one, who then should just accept it, which will give a great peace, and as said in the example of Sisyphus a state of happiness, and essentially - keep living. Camus claims that the paradox of life is that the contradiction of the absurd cannot exist without a man, thus one should keep living to keep it alive. In the example of Sisyphus, his eternal punishment has become his life purpose which keeps him alive as he fully accepts the certainty of his fate. According to Camus, life is intrinsically meaningless, but it borrows the value one puts in it to serve the contradiction, thus meaning of life is the meaning one gives. 

For Camus falling into the escapism will lead to two fallacious ways: suicide and hope. Suicide in this case concludes that if life is meaningless then it is not worth living, while the second alternative of escaping the feeling of absurdity - hope denies that life is meaningless by means of blind faith. In The Rebel (1951), Camus says that to determine the answer for the fundamental question of life is to determine to be or not to be, as Nietzsche considers it as important as he does. But, guided by the answer there are different sets of actions. Suicide has always been considered exclusively as social phenomenon but from the very beginning he raises the question of the connection of suicide with the individual's thinking. Because, according to Camus, “the worm sits in the human heart, and that's where you need to look for it”. He despises any case in which life should be cut off by suicide, and in existentialism there is an easy way to fall into the trap of pessimism and conform to the irrationality of the realm. Camus jokingly says that the famous example of it can be Schopenhauer (the dad of Arthur Schopenhauer) who killed himself due to depression. The pessimistic existentialist belief of Schopenhauer could push anyone to the verge, as he always compares life to suffering which has a really bad connotation and would make one miserable believing in such a tragedy of a fate.  

Hope, on the other hand, is not satisfying to him too, as he claims that it is another trap. Camus’ epiphany stroked when he was first introduced to the absurd world of Dostoevsky. In his collection of essays on absurd he does a case study on The Possessed (1872), where Dostoevsky starts from, and is obsessed with, absurd reasoning. There is a note on Dostoevsky from Camus: "One must love life before loving its meaning, says Dostoyevsky . . . yes, and when love of life disappears, no meaning can console us”.  He explores Dostoevsky’s description of life as chaotic and irrational, which he finds resonating, especially through Kirillov, character from The Possessed, who understands this confrontation, but commits what he calls a "logical suicide" (or philosophical suicide). Though acknowledging the absurdity is present in Dostoevsky’s works, he ultimately backs away and leaps into faith. Here, those who keep hoping won't acknowledge the absurd and will be largely unfree. Accepting that there is hope, is to despair one’s life by giving the possibility to another one. Camus was the “you live only once” guy, as his whole ideology falls into the belief of maximizing the fulfillment in the life, we are given now without hoping for an after-life, or another one (depending on your religion). Because of the fact that, like Kierkegaard as he mentions in his book, French existentialists mostly chose the safe option to escape the absurd, so he did not want to identify himself with them. 

An Invincible Summer

Sartre was one of those who admired Camus’ vision, as he quotes him saying “in the depths of winter, I discovered that there lay within me an invincible summer”, which he states gave hope to millions of his readers around the world. Camus' influence after getting the Nobel prize increased drastically, so everyone waited for him to speak up on the independence issue. The laureate’s friend group was like the Beatles of that time, including him - Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. They had not only their own philosophical views but the political sides they stuck to. Camus, though first joined Communist party, was against radical views such as Merleau-Ponty's, the same way he was not fully supportive of the democrats (but he still supported the latter more as he engaged in political activities with Sartre and spoke the Revolutionary Democratic Union). Camus threw under the critique both the US and the Soviet Union, as both systems neglected the rights of the proletariat. Later after this he had a withdrawal from publicity, because of the political tension that pressed him from both fronts, and also due to Francine’s worsening state of depression. After the situation in Algeria got worse, he raised the pacifist view where he claimed that violence is a stupidity that will never get the right justice. As a person from a family of pied noirs he was in a difficult dilemma, where complexity of his origin gave him hard time to rely on one of the sides, besides he would not be able to choose one side so rather accept the good old synthesis of two countries back. But public needed Camus’ voice, they needed him to choose a side his opinion mattered but he chose to be silent.