August 16, 2006

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.

2 Comments:

At 4:39 AM, August 16, 2006, Blogger Andy Moskowitz said...

Sure he wasn't just looking for books about killing Arabs?

 
At 4:46 AM, August 16, 2006, Blogger Krishna said...

Ha ha! I thought about that. It certainyl makes quite an amusing story. But I can't seriously imagine he was actually looking for such books.

Thanks for the thought.

 

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