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The Blue Hour in Camus

(Picture: Ramon Espińa Fernand…)

(22.3.2023) One can be bored with the public intellectuals of the 1950s. Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir – weren’t they wrong all of the time? Didn’t they lecture their audiences, then, on the Soviet Union and China, while, actually, being concerned more with their respective love life? Yes, okay. But one might ask back – and I imagine that these three would ask back from their graves – do you, do we trust swarm intelligence more? Perhaps we only have to find new perspectives on these three writers, philosophers and public intellectuals. And there is one perspective that I would like to suggest here: to look at these three, not as public intellectuals, or not only as public intellectuals, not as, or not only as common men and a common women, but as artists of light, artists of light, however, that still have to be discovered (as we try to do here).

1) Camus as an Artist of Light

(Picture: United Press International)

(Picture: Rotislav Botev)

There is light and shadow in Albert Camus, and the light is, in general, better known. This is true on a metaphorical level, because Camus might have been right on Stalinism early, but his actual political visions are decidedly less known and perhaps more problematic. And this is not what they teach you at school. At school they might rather teach you that Camus was the philosopher of the absurd, of the hard and cold light of absurdity, and also that Camus was the singer of Mediterranean light, of brutal light and a black and blinding sun, and of Mediterranean light that might make one, on the other hand, love life, since one could, at least for short moments, love nature (or art reflecting it). Less known, however, might be that, at Paris, Camus chose an apartment that had no sun light at all. Or that, at New York, he was benumbed by artificial light. And probably they do not teach you at school that Camus was also a writer of twilight, of dusk, and of the blue hour. But he experienced that when travelling in Greece, while enjoying the Aegean Sea by boat in 1955, describing such experience in one of his journals, and this particular passage even has found its way into a philosophical book which is asking for the ways of how to reach happiness in life (if only, perhaps, momentarily):

»We sail in the middle of these distant islands on an illuminated sea, which gently wrinkles itself, runs parallel to Syros at length; soon Mykonos appears and as the day advances it begins to become clearer, its snakehead that bends toward Delos still invisible behind Rinia. The sun sets as we find ourselves nearly in the center of a circle of islands whose colors begin to change. Faded gold, cyclamen, a mauve-green, then the colors darken and on the still glistening sea the island masses become a dark blue. It is a strange and vast calming that then falls on the waters. Happiness at last, happiness close to tears, because I wish to hold against me, to squeeze, this inexpressible joy that, however, I know must disappear. But for so many days it lasts faintly, today it grips my heart so definitely that it seems to me I should be able to regain it faithfully every time I wish to do so.« (p. 91; entry for May 6,7,8 1955; translation by Ryan Bloom)

(Picture: KENPEI)

One might think of Camus doing light art here, and one might even think about doing a reenactment of this scene, but sadly, I find the philosopher at dusk rather a bit foreseeable, a bit boring. And I am tempted to ask if Existentialism, perhaps, diagnosed problems, suggested cures for these problems, problems that, simply, people who love nature or art (or even people that simply have a hobby) do not have, because such people solve the problem Existentialism diagnosed instinctively?

2) The Philosopher at Dusk

I believe that it is less the play of colors (Camus is indirectly referring to flowers when naming colors, after the gold has faded), but rather the feeling of being embedded into nature, into the cycle of nature, and into a waterscape, the landscape of an island world. Thus it is also less the blue hour that made him happy, but rather the intense feeling of being – within nature, the cosmos, of which the blue hour is, in the framework of the cycle of time, one passing phase. And this kind of happiness Camus expressed, restrained by the feeling, the knowledge of passing time, of mortality, of the difficulty of experiencing it again, one might also experience in a garden, after having spent the afternoon working, and now resting, observing, and musing about what was and what there might be to come.
I find it strange though, that Camus seems to have had so little optimism, as to experiencing the feeling of happiness again, since, if you are a lover of nature (or of literature), there is always, as one might say, something to come back to. And actually Camus’ project as a writer was, as he once noted, to draw on his experience of happiness, of the good in life, transmitting that good, via literature, to others. If we are further transmitting such experiences, and be it only in terms of a short passage from one his journals, we actually do, in good faith that this makes further sense, what Camus himself had in mind when embarking on writing, and why not becoming a collector of such passages? Why not reenacting them, in one’s mind (and perhaps with the help of pictures, as we do here, also drawing on the photographers’ works that are provided via Wikipedia).

3) Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as Artists of Light?

(Picture: Lapplaender)

(Picture: ISS Crew)

Simone de Beauvoir loved the hours of the early day and the evening twilight. Often, in her memoirs (we have looked into one volume, here), not actually painting dusk and dawn, she showed herself susceptible to such impressions and mentioned them: a certain mountain in the north of Sweden, the Nuolja (picture on the left), we may climb with her (and Sartre) in 1947, observing how the evening twilight blended with the red of dawn (p. 136). And spectacular might have been to experience the dusk, not in the Aegean Sea, but in another spectacular water landscape: the Mississippi (p. 156), at the place where it is welcoming the floods of the Ohio river (picture on the right). She also mentions to enthusiastically having watched the sunset on the Loire in her youth (p. 282), and still watched it enthusiastically with Claude Lanzmann in Spain (p. 299). But the most detailed account of twilight hours we get after she moved into a studio, an apartment in Paris in 1956, and we may witness the early dawning in winter as well as the early hours of the day in summer, associated with thoughts about time passing and mortality, but then she goes on to work, as a writer – with writing about China, and about her trip with Sartre in 1955 (p. 332).
Sartre, according to Simone de Beauvoir less susceptible as thoughts of mortality (p. 136), was impressed by the atmospheres of the Nuolja too. As a writer he did once include a blue hour into one of his novels. It was his first novel, Nausea, of 1938. But the passage with the blue hour got cut. Who would have thought that such thing happened to a writer like Sartre? But some editions of the novel do include the passage in some kind of annex.

(Picture: Nafie shehu)

Further Reading:
Albert Camus [translator: Ryan Bloom], Notebooks 1951-1959, Chicago 2008;
Simone de Beauvoir, Der Lauf der Dinge, Reinbek 1979 [1963];
Annemarie Pieper, Glückssache. Die Kunst gut zu leben, Hamburg 2001 [p. 94f.]