Here's a good quote from the end of Camus' first chapter in The Rebel:
Meanwhile, we can sum up the initial progress that the spirit of rebellion provokes in a mind that is originally imbued with the absurdity and apparent sterility of the world. In absurdist experience, suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel – therefore we exist.
Agreed – though that part about contemplating humanity's place in the universe also reminds me of an optimistic counter-argument from Split Enz: The tyranny of distance didn't stop the cavalier, so why should it stop me? I'll conquer and stay free!
Trying to read more this semester, and not just for school, but also for the soul (partially in order to cope with the reading for school). Sometimes there's a little overlap. Here are some quotes from the non-assigned reading I've been doing lately, mostly about identity in some form:
"Even after all this, one hardly knows what Sam Spade looked like. But everyone knows what Humphrey Bogart looked like. A reader of unillustrated fiction completes the work in his mind; the reader of a comic book or the viewer of a movie is passive. That is why kids lose a lot when they don't read fiction, even when the movies and television that they watch are aesthetically superior."
- Gaiman v McFarlane, 360 F.3d 644 (7th Cir. 2004)
"Eloise shook Mary Jane's arm. 'I was a nice girl,' she pleaded, 'wasn't I?'"
- J.D. Salinger, "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut", Nine Stories
"From the situation where I now am, I see a scene of ambition beyond all my former suspicions or imagination… Jealousies and rivalries… never stared me in the face in such horrid forms as in the present."
- John Adams, as quoted in David McCullough's John Adams
"Rather, the point is that most people have experienced what might be referred to as compromising moments of identity performance – moments in which a person's performance of identity contradicts some political or social image that person has of herself."
- Devon Carbado & Mitu Gulati, Working Identity, 85 Cornell L. Rev. 1259
A common thread: the disconcerting confrontations of the present.