Adam Gopnik has an article about Camus in a recent issue of The New Yorker. In addition to provoking my interest in reading Camus, the article made a funny point in passing. To paraphrase, Gopnik essentially said that beautiful people have no need for intellectual pursuits as they impress the masses by simply being. So when a beautiful person actually makes a fruitful quest for lofty intellectual goals (like Camus did), he must be something extraordinary.
Is it true? Who the hell knows. But the psychological effect of beautiful people being smart and accomplished on us average people is certainly observable and common. Beautiful people with charisma do not live on the same planet as the rest of us, and we gawk at them with a strange fascination.
2 comments:
Thanks for this post. I have to look this up. Im a big fan of Adam Gopnik. And one of my favorite books is The Plague (though I havent read anything else by Camus).
Hey, Mark!
Before reading the article I didn't know Satre was so despised by American scholars because he was a Communist supporter in the post-war period.
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