Gods of Summer
“These men have not cheated. Gods of summer they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life, and they still are, deprived of all hope.” ALBERT CAMUS · SUMMER IN ALGIERS
We step out of the sickroom and into the sun. Long before The Plague, a young Camus wrote a luminous essay called Summer in Algiers, a love letter to the poor neighborhood where he grew up and the working men who filled it. He watches them at the beach, in the dance halls, playing cards outside in the evening, and he writes, These men have not cheated. Gods of summer they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life, and they still are, deprived of all hope.
These were not important people. They were dockworkers and mechanics with little money and less future, men the world would call ordinary or worse. Camus, who came from exactly this world, refuses to pity them. He sees instead a kind of nobility. They have not cheated, meaning they have not lied to themselves about life, not traded the real world for a promised better one, not gone gray with anxious hoping. They pour themselves into what is actually here, the sea, the heat, the game, each other. Deprived of all hope in the grand sense, they are somehow more alive than the comfortable.
This is solidarity of a warmer kind than we have met so far. Not the alliance of the fight but the fellowship of a place, the brotherhood of people who share a street, a climate, a hard and vivid life. Camus recognizes himself among them, and in doing so he tells us where his loyalty lies, always with the humble, the many, the unglamorous living.
It is a reminder that belonging is not only forged in struggle. It is also just this, the people you come from and stand among, sharing the ordinary sun.
Today, claim your own Belcourt. Sit among the people of your everyday life, your neighbors, your regulars, your own kind, and feel the plain fellowship of a shared place. You belong to them more than you think.
