| Volume 7, Number 1, January 2010 |
Albert Camus in China
by 牛竞凡 Niu Jingfan
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Conversations with Albert Camus
by Howard Mumma 霍华德·穆玛 |
| WHILE his fame and profound influence were reaching out to the whole world in the twentieth century, Albert Camus had to face his late arrival in modern China. For a China that was deeply mired in the domestic conflicts and foreign invasions in the first half of the last century and for the Chinese intellectuals struggling in a time out of joint, Camus’s Sisyphus Question that explored all the aspects of human existence in an age of peace and his sense of Strangerness were too untimely. However, for a China that had been closed to the outside world for more than 30 years and for her people who had survived the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Great Starvation in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, any modernistic writings on absurdity and anti-absurdity or nihility and anti-nihility would better portray their spiritual predicament and pursuit than the classics. Accordingly, around the beginning of the 1980s when modern Western literary works were rushing into China, Camus’s rise in the Chinese horizon turned out to be timely...
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ONE day toward the end of my summer in Paris, the concierge’s wife prepared supper for Camus and me. We had planned to take a ride that afternoon, but after we finished our meal, we could not bring ourselves to leave. We chose instead to sit and enjoy the view of the river. We were both relaxed and enjoying the weather when Camus broke the silence: “Howard, do you perform baptisms?”
For a moment I thought I was going to fall off my chair. “Yes, Albert, I do,” I answered with some tension and surprise.
“What is the significance of this rite?”
I had become accustomed to his questions and by now we had developed a kind of routine. Still, there was something different about this question. He seemed more than merely curious, rather contemplative, as if this question was more personal to him.
“Baptism is not necessarily a supernatural experience,” I began. “The important thing is not the heavens opening up or the dove or the voice. Those are the externals...
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| Issue 7.1 |
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India’s Peaceful Rise
in World Politics
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