1 November 2025
Camus, The Stranger (The Outsider here in the UK). Rang my bell. Something in it I can't help but connect to Cézanne with regard to lucidity and vision. Meursault is seemingly in a state of harmony with himself, but it's detached—self-denial cloaked in self-acceptance. He isn't capable of embracing the sun or confronting his distinctly human inability to conceptualize what it represents (which to me feels language-less, not so much divine but earthly and present and vital). Been spending a lot of time with Cézanne this week, and there's almost a kind of vein-bulging strain that comes through from the intensity of his yearning to wrangle something along the lines of that very thing. Even as it resists him. Which it always will as an inherently indifferent force. Something embodied, elusive, impossibly but undeniably there.