Poverty shaped Camus’s entire sensibility and worldview

Evidence

Thus, while the bourgeois young Sartre had his dreams of literary derring-do, and Merleau-Ponty had his happiness at being unconditionally loved, and Beauvoir had her books and sweet-shop windows, Camus grew up into a world of silence and absences. His family had no electricity, no running water, no newspapers, no books, no radio, few visitors at home, and no sense of the wider ‘life-worlds’ of others. He did manage to escape, to a lycée in Algiers and then to a career as a journalist and writer, but his childhood marked him. The very first entry of his first diary, written when he was twenty-two, contains the remark, ‘A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 480

Categorization

• APHORISMS: Camus’s diary line — years without money create a whole sensibility — reads as durable life-advice about how material lack reconfigures a person.
• XREF: The idea that material conditions constitute a worldview parallels the phenomenological theme that lived experience shapes perception. — connects to: Camus’s absurdist themes grew out of his colonial and impoverished childhood — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 479