marriage.....

ok, so this quote is attributed to albert camus, whose birthday would have been today.....if he actually celebrated birthdays.....

He said, "The only thing is to decide which is the most aesthetic form of suicide: marriage and a 40-hour-a-week job, or a revolver."

In the spring of 1940, Camus moved to Paris just as the war began with Nazi Germany. In the turmoil of that time, he wrote letters to a woman named Francine, who soon became his wife. He said, "I only know that I will maintain what I believe to be true in my own universe, and as an individual I will give in to nothing."

The Stranger was published in 1942, followed by a collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus (1943). He also wrote The Plague (1947), a novel about the way ordinary people react when disease terrorizes their city. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and he was killed in a car accident in 1960. Camus said, "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."

ok, so let's review these quotations.......he considered marriage a form of suicide, yet he went to the trouble to get married.....though he might have formed his opinion of marriage after getting married.......he was an existentialist in his thoughts about living life and finding happiness.......so i suppose he could have had moments of happiness in his marriage on those days when he was not looking to find them.......hmmmmmmmmm.....i read the stranger once-upon-a-time.....and camus did not strike me as a glass half-full kind of guy, rather as someone so wrapped up in his own angst that he thinks of no one but himself.......so relationships like marriage which require bothing giving and taking of time, emotions, and resources would be quite difficult for someone who insists that he can only be true to his own universe........hey, let's review the original quote.......camus referred both to
marriage and the 40-hour work week.......there's the rub.......maybe it was just the drudge that work can become that he couldn't handle........good thing he chose writing, a career which requires one to be one's worst critis........and that is very hard work indeed......