Bush Reads Camus!

It seems that president Bush read Albert Camus's novel "The Stranger" during his recent vacation in Crawford, Texas. Ha ha!

(As it happens, I also read this novel recently. I found it quite fascinating as a novel, though the whole "life is absurd" thing did not impress me - as yet anyway.)

But it is rather interesting that Bush is venturing into stuff like this. The carefully constructed image of a man who abhors all intellectual enterprises is showing cracks. Actually, existentialism, as a philosophy, revolts against the methodology of standard philosophical traditions. However, this revolt itself is carried out in a highly intellectual fashion.

It is impossible not to be struck by the "absurdity" of Bush reading Camus.

As Maureen Dowd wrote in New York Times today,

[I]f there was ever a confirmation of Camus’s sense of the absurdity of life, it’s that the president is reading him.