Camus's New York Diary (1946) | Hacker News Reader

Camus's New York Diary (1946)

theparisreview.org

71 pointsamanuensis39 comments

> Their fondness for animals. A multistory pet shop: canaries on the second floor, great apes at the top. A couple of years ago, a man was arrested on Fifth Avenue for driving a giraffe around in his truck. He explained that his giraffe didn’t get enough air out in the suburbs where he kept it and that he’d found this to be a good way to get it some air. In Central Park, a lady brought a gazelle to graze. To the court, she explained that the gazelle was a person. “Yet it doesn’t speak,” the judge said. “Oh, yes, it speaks the language of lovingkindness.” Five-dollar fine. There’s also the three-kilometer tunnel under the Hudson and the impressive bridge to New Jersey.

Did he step through a door to Narnia or something? New York used to be wild!

Great apes, giraffe, gazelles!?

I imagine the giraffe found the tall buildings and the people at eye level with it to be a splendid surprise. Though, it was less enthused with the prospect of trying to get around on the subway.

My dad got a pet monkey in New York in the 1950s when he was a kid. Moishe the monkey. According to Dad, he used to walk the monkey around the park in the Bronx and introduce him to girls. (Translation: The monkey introduced my dad to girls.) The downside was the monkey made a complete mess of his parents' apartment and they ended up giving him away.

Something about Camus' succinct but elegant way of writing that is very attractive to me. That man was just too cool.

One of my favorite wikipedia articles of all time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase

Nice! Especially liked this one:

> When he was consulted on how Spartans might best forestall invasion of their homeland, Lycurgus advised, "By remaining poor, and each man not desiring to possess more than his fellow."

I went through a phase where I was reading Camus's notebooks. They weren't finished or complete ideas and I loved the ideas that were packed in. I didn't have the same attraction to his stories. I will definitely revisit him at some point.

> Something about Camus' succinct but elegant way of writing that is very attractive to me.

Sure, you... and the 1957 Nobel Committee.

> The heart trembles before so much remarkable inhumanity.

i can see what he is getting at, though i have to say that on my own visits to NY (from london, uk) i often thought there was too much humanity!

> Finally a country that really takes care of its children.

I mentally shed a tear when I reached this part.

> I notice that I haven’t noticed the skyscrapers, that they’ve seemed only natural. It’s a question of overall scale. And in any case, you can’t always walk around with your head turned up. A person can keep only so many floors in sight at once.

Just realised that this is happening in the centre of the city I live in. Quite a few 45 and 50 story towers going up, but from street level it is just buildings like the 10 story ones before.

The reason for this is the setback requirement. Once a setback is small enough, you can't see the full scale of the building, and you stop noticing.

Ironically, decreasing setbacks lets you build taller without making cities feel overwhelming.

I recently read The Plague by Camus about an epidemic happening in colonial Oran, Algeria. I sometimes smiled at how underwhelming it was in comparison to what the COVID pandemic revealed about society and human nature in times of total catastrophe.

Had to read it in school. Iirc it was a direct response and commentary/allegory of ww2.

It's popular to connect The Plague to mid 20th century fascism. The message is actually much deeper and more broad than that specific point in time of Western history.

I read it recently too and I was actually impressed by how well he described the atmosphere of the quarantine. It made me wonder if he actually lived through one.

Happy guy for an existentialist of that period; most were dour and fatalist. I like him!

He always rebuked the "existentialist" moniker for that reason. Most would call him an absurdist for his insistence towards finding happiness amidst the absurd indifference of life towards ones aspirations.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Easy to say when the daily climb is up to the cliff house where you're shacked up with a couple chicks.

Well, he was a part of the resistance against Nazi occupation. Albeit less on the front lines and more on the journalistic side, but nonetheless. I'd say it's valid enough to give him the opportunity to have an existential crisis.

Camus referred to himself as a moralist.

      Camus was a moralist; he claimed morality should guide politics. While he did not deny that morals change over time, he rejected the classical Marxist view that historical material relations define morality.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus#Political_stance

Moralism is a political viewpoint not unlike pragmatism. It doesn't necessarily qualify as a philosophical viewpoint though, as what morals one believes should be informing politics would be dictated by their philosophies.

> It doesn't necessarily qualify as a philosophical viewpoint though

Sure it does, and more than once.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralism

"A stroll to Staten Island"

Pardon me? Like, through New Jersey? Hell of a stroll!

perhaps he took a ferry? and isn't there a bridge? things may get lost in translation.

There's no bridge to this day. There's the start of a tunnel on both ends, but not very far along. He likely took a ferry.

what about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verrazzano-Narrows_Bridge

It didn't open until after Camus had died.

well, though i may claim to know something about camus, i would not claim to know anything at all about bridges,

He said "there's no bridge to this day".

There's no bridge to the day from Manhattan* where Camus appeared to be spending time. There is indeed the Verazzano narrows bridge to south Brooklyn. But that would be a pretty far walk

Obvious mistranslation. I am guessing the intended meaning of the French original was something like "excursion" or "cruise".

A mistranslation. I have an original french version which says "Promenade avec Chiaromonte et Abel à Staten Island.", so we're talking about a walk in Staten Island, not to Staten Island I believe.

Google Translate says: "Walk with Chiaromonte and Abel in Staten Island."

But I think it should be "on Staten Island"? So perhaps the score is:

Google Translate: ½

Ryan Bloom: 0

(Sorry, Ryan! I've made worse mistakes myself!)

I wonder how many other lines are completely inaccurate? Makes me not want to bother reading... anything translated.

Is this originally written in English ?

  These diaries are adapted from Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan and translated by Ryan Bloom

No, the original is Journaux de voyage, Gallimard 1978, ISBN 2070298531

Reply on news.ycombinator.com