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The Silence Camus Refused to Domesticate: Hazel Barnes, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the Cost of a Sympathetic Misreading

Hazel Barnes was one of the most careful American readers of French existentialism in the twentieth century. She translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956, a labor that shaped how generations of American students encountered Continental thought. When she turns to Camus, though, something interesting happens on the page. Her summary of The Myth of Sisyphus is partly accurate and partly an act of quiet translation in the other direction, pulling Camus toward a Sartrean humanism that Camus himself spent the last decade of his life resisting.

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The Finite Lens: How a Fragile Life Gives Shape to an Infinite Universe

The question arrives early and stays late: what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life inside an infinite, eternal universe? Every serious person encounters this problem, usually around the age when the body first betrays its limits, and no one resolves it cleanly. Theology dissolves the question by denying its premise. Science measures the mismatch with such precision that the human side of the equation vanishes into decimal places. And the popular existentialist answers, the ones printed on coffee mugs and quoted in commencement speeches, have been sanded down so thoroughly that they function as anesthesia rather than analysis.

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Tribute to Viktor Frankl

by Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D.

Albert Camus wrote in The First Man: “There are people who vindicate the world, who help others just by their presence.” “Yes, and they die,” Malan said.

As a eulogy, I offer this excerpt from my personal journal. It is a small token of my esteem for Viktor Frankl who died Tuesday, September 2, 1997 at the age of 92. Professor Frankl keynoted both the 1990 Evolution of Psychotherapy Conferences and 1994 European Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference organized by the Milton H. Erickson Foundation.

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