A HOUSE FOR ALBERT CAMUS

Literature can and should accomplish much more than just a tittilating invitation to superficial thrills / horrors the kind Stephen King is famous for, or, looking the other way,  a more or less benign flight into a "Gothic fantasy" the kind the Harry Potter series is explosively notorious for.

In other words, a writer can and should do more than just SELL, SELL, SELL, in the name of a "culture" obsessed by ESCAPING reality, through either benevolent(?) fancy or horror...!

True art brings us CLOSER to REALITY! It is never an ESCAPE from REALITY!

On the 4th of January this year we celebrated 50 years since Albert Camus' death. This event left us pondering on the meaning of life and on the meaning of the intellectual gestures in society, then and now, there and here.

How many intellectuals, today, are as involved socially, politically, as Albert Camus was...? Without betraying, or lowering, the very high standards that he set for himself...?

We wish we will have again such writers, such intellectuals! We need them badly!

Away from the ivory tower of the comfortable academia...!

Away from the commercial "phenomenon" of "fright literature" that a Steven King, for example, makes his vain fortunes from!

Away from the infantilisation of culture (albeit well intentioned, perhaps) that an ever increasing series like the Harry Potter "phenomenon" serves, in ever more pleasing and misleading ways...!

Back to sobriety, even austerity. Back to an intense, serious involvement with life as lived, here and now. Back to protesting war, back to protesting injustice, back to serious religious dilemmas, back to THINKING, back to anguish even! Lucidly, sensitively, passionately, rigorously, all at the same time!

We need again men and women like Albert Camus!

He died tragically, young.

But he is still alive. In our hearts and our minds and our longings to be and become better!

Design a HOUSE FOR ALBERT CAMUS!

A responsible house! A moral house! A house engaged with society in its own terms. A house that assumes geometry as a means of expressing a Doric / Modern sensibility morality. Rectitude.

Be moral.

Be engaged!

Be Doric.

Be Albert Camus.

Design for Albert Camus!

And refuse to settle for less!