Albert Camus wrote in his journals that if he ‘had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank’. 

On the last page he said he would write, ‘I recognise only one duty, and that is to love’. But Camus didn’t tell us (at least not directly) what love is, or how to understand our duty to it. 

What he did write about was a way of understanding our struggle in an absurd world as an act of rebellion. And what is love if not an act of rebellion? Even the very best of lives will end in death, with no shortage of suffering beforehand. And then there are the rest of us: condemned to death as much as to life. How do we live with this? What makes it worth it? Camus’s answer is rebellion; in art; in beauty, and in love. 

While revolt and freedom are familiar themes in Camus’s work, passion is the third consequence of the absurd.

Unlike Hamlet, for whom ‘to be or not to be’ was the prevailing question, and inaction the prevailing behaviour, Camus tells us the ‘whole question’ is ‘whether or not one can live with one’s passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt’. Life for Camus, like art, beauty, and love, is a call to action.