Nothing means anything, by Clifford Thurlow

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        If nothing means anything, what’s the point – in anything? Love, hope, dreams, desire, having babies – existence?

This was the conundrum Albert Camus wrestled with after the slaughter of the Second World War when Europe lay in ruins and the future looked as grey as the past.

Post-war writers rejected the notion of a caring God and sought meaning in new isms and new ways at looking at the world. Camus set out aged 22 to explore nihilism – the philosophy founded in Russia before the revolution and championed by André Breton. As he studied nihilism, he slipped into those dark places of the mind where shadows lengthen, and reptiles lay their eggs. He finally clawed himself out of the mental quick sands into the misty fields of existentialism ploughed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Camus quickly bored with existentialism. He left Jean-Paul and Simone like a couple of old overcoats abandoned in a bar and turned to absurdism: ‘The conflict between seeking the inherent value and the meaning of life and the human inability to find these things with any certainty.’

As a writer, he had found his mission. Camus had made a name for himself with the publication in 1942 of L’Etranger. In the novel, through the prism of absurdity, he explores the inadequacy of traditional values, alienation and the meaning of life. Meursault, his anti-hero, murders an Arab on the beach for no apparent reason and is unable in the aftermath to show emotion or satisfy the expectations of others by defending himself.

When I read L’Etranger aged 18, it was so compelling, I drove on the country road from Broadstairs to Canterbury with the book balanced against the steering wheel so I could keep turning the pages. My girlfriend in the passenger seat called me ‘absurd.’ I laughed so much I almost crashed into a tree and she decided she never wanted to see me again.

L’Etranger made me question the ordinariness and absurdity of my own existence. I was about to follow the expectations of my family by going to university but reset the motions of the stars by joining the local newspaper as a cub reporter. Unlike Camus manning the Paris barricades from Nazis, there was no bloodshed to report from the cauliflower fields and orchards of East Kent, but the detour into journalism was life changing and took me to galaxies I did not know existed.

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