Everything I’ve read by Albert Camus I have loved, and it is the same for The Myth of Sisyphus, only a portion of which I probably understood. From the back of the book: “[T]he essay presents a meditation on suicide–the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning.”
As I understand it, in this book/essay, Camus uses the term “absurd” to mean the meaninglessness of the universe. It is through the acknowledgement of this absurdity that the limits of knowledge are paradoxically expanded; accepting nothing is accepting all. (Camus incessantly talks about paradoxes and contradictions, which I confess baffled me more often than not, although with Camus I normally assume he is right and I am dim.)
Early in the book, Camus states: “This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.” Later he comments, “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” Throughout his treatise, Camus acknowledges the human heart and its passions, while making it clear that genius is “the intelligence that knows its frontiers,” that knows its limits. It’s why I love him so much–as dense as some of his philosophical work is, Camus’s understanding of what makes us human comes through. I guess that’s one of his paradoxes: he talks of everything beginning with “lucid indifference,” but there is such a sense that somehow the meaning of life is wrapped in the acknowledgement that there is none.
This is the extent to which I understood the book. As much as I understood it, I agreed with it. I’ve always felt close to the existentialists, without always fully comprehending their argument!