Zara blazer (similar)
Sezane tank
Sezane jeans
Flattered boots (similar)
JW Pei handbag (similar)
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Vintage necklace (similar)
Stella & Dot ring
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (similar)
Location: Manitoba Courts – Winnipeg, Manitoba
We read Camus and Sartre in school, alongside Shakespeare and Salinger. I was in French immersion, a uniquely Canadian form of education wherein English children learn in French from kindergarten onward. The result, for most of my peers, was that they spoke French until they left school. For me, on the other hand, it is, I realise more and more as time goes on, that I struggle to distinguish English and French as independent languages. In my head, the words all belong to my vocabulary. I rarely remember what language I read a book in, or what language I was speaking in conversation. But I remember the French from Camus.
I remember Camus because I loathed his from the first pages of L’Etranger. What a disappointment, after waiting through ninth and tenth grades to read something more complex than Marcel Dube plays, to be handed such a flimsy text, more philosophical treatise than novel. I wanted a story and I got… something significantly less, in my seventeen-year-old estimation.
What I’ve learned, in the intervening years, is that the best books are not always the ones we love. They are the ones that make us react, make us feel something, even if it’s negative. There was something in Camus work that provoked me, continues to provoke me even now.
I’ve had Camus on my mind lately. Not that famous book that I despised so openly in my late teens, but a brief passage from La Femme adultere, a lesser known short story, certainly not one that is regularly taught to high school students. It talks about waiting.
Waiting, the activity that we’ve collectively pursued almost exclusively, albeit with limited willingness and enthusiasm, since March. For good news, for a light at the end of the tunnel, for a return to the life we once knew. Waiting, without knowing exactly what we’re waiting for, because time does not travel backward and because every experience changes us, which renders the wish for a return to a past version of life an impossible, thus futile, one.
We know this, but we keep waiting – there is nothing else to do. When Camus described his heroine, Janine, she was a woman living her life but convinced there should be more to it. The description was specific to her experience and yet, in 2020, it takes on a poignant universality that I did not expect, when I first read it years ago, that it ever could.
…he wrote about one woman, but he might as well have been describing us all. Half a lifetime after I picked up his most famous novel for the first time, I know I’ll never love his work, no matter what language its printed in. But I can acknowledge that, at times, he was deadly right. Janine was waiting, in 1957… and like her, I’m waiting now.
I think the only Camus work I’ve read is, unsurprisingly, The Stranger, but this excerpt really does speak to something in an almost unnevering way. Waiting indeed.
Courtney ~ Sartorial Sidelines
That does ring so true. We are waiting, but for what?
I wish I were taught a second language starting in kindergarten, yet another failing of this country… how much more of the world is open to those who can think in more than one language?