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 men who filled it. He watches them at the beach, in the dance halls, playing cards outside in the evening.
These were not important people. Dockworkers and mechanics with little money and less future, men the world would call ordinary. Camus, who came from exactly this world, refuses to pity them. He sees a kind of nobility instead. 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 here, the sea, the heat, the game, each other, and are somehow more alive than the comfortable.
This is a warmer solidarity than we have met so far. Not the alliance of the fight but the fellowship of a place, of people who share a street and a climate and a hard, vivid life. Camus recognizes himself among them, and tells us where his loyalty lies.
Belonging is not only forged in struggle. It is also just this, the people you come from and stand among, sharing the ordinary sun.
Claim your own Belcourt. Sit among the people of your everyday life and feel the plain fellowship of a shared place. You belong to them more than you think.
