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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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Yourself is Enough!

Reflecting on the tapestry of human history, it is impossible to overlook the paramount influence religion has wielded in the formation of societies, civilizations, and cultural dynamics. While I express this understanding as an atheist, it’s crucial to honor all perspectives’ authenticity, even when they diverge from one’s views. Different people draw different meanings from various life aspects, and for many, religion serves as an unwavering beacon guiding them through life’s daunting maze. In this context, I’m aiming to explore a widening path in contemporary society; empowering self-driven lives, where belief in oneself takes precedence. It’s about ensuring that one realizes, “Yourself is Enough.”

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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 10 (2019) Waits for You!

If it’s the end of the year, then that means it is time, once again, to thank you for all soulful investments you have shared with us throughout the last 12 months! We now humbly ask you to continue to believe in us by purchasing the latest edition of — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 10 (2019) — to help us continue to protect the truth when covered in facts-of-lies and fits-of-dismay, and we do that every day, across all our communication platforms, to keep alive the right life of the mind.

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Advice for 2020 Democrats

Today, let’s offer some friendly advice to the Democrat nominee nation based on the results of the first debate, and inspired by things to watch for in the upcoming second debate. First, I was born in the middle of the country surrounded by waves of Republicans. I currently work on the East Coast and on the West Coast — and a lot of Democrats pay me a lot of money. I have experience flipping on both sides of this national dime, and the Democrat Party has a long way to go to defeat an anachronistic, charismatic, President who feasts on the gruel of the worst in humanity.

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Return of the Hood

We tend to think of our common, American past, as a series of moments of shared quaintness — pocked with unimaginable lightning strikes of violence that we’d rather soon forget — and so we have.

Where once we cringed at the white robe, and the Hitler salutes of those Anti-Americans who were landed, and living among us, we now have them — fresh faced, cauterized, and smelling of Pine-Sol and Mothballs — all around us, Heiling Hitler, but not the rest of us; seeking a clawback return to a time they never knew, and a place they never dwelled, and yet, they seek validation, and exclusive membership, in a grog of hate that bears the sealing wax impression, and the tacit approval, of our President of the United States of America.

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Jesus Magnets

A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to the “Rusty Midwest Bible Belt” and gave me two refrigerator magnets he bought in a Church store.

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The Hand of a Crystal God: Ten Sentence Story #132

Robert awoke to find the crystal hand of God had shattered between his fingers overnight.

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How Not to Faint

The faith of waking is important to covet when you are faced with a life-threatening injury.  An EMT first responder buddy of mine told me about the “fainting effect” that happens when they first arrive on scene.

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Ten Sixty-Eight

City on a hill starring a demon in the depths.

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Moral Indoctrination and the Church

The Greeks made a bold move and removed the question of morality from the secular world and replaced that mandate with the universal ideal of ethical behavior governed by laws.  We became a people of rules and laws and ethics in the state — making us completely unique in the world — because no other competing species for our time and space is able to cognitively think, make value judgments and create a standard, equitable, criteria for living as citizens that requires we help each other instead of trying to kill each other.  We are ruled by our minds and not our emotional instincts.  We have patterns of written expectation we agree to adhere to in order to get along with each other — and the role of the historic Church in antiquity was to mediate the meticulous, and sometimes tenuous, dyad between a people and their state — and to help regulate an effervescent values system and to negotiate a context for living a moral life in a shapeshifting world.

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