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| Luigi Faccuito - Never Stop Moving |
WHY GO THERE WHEN GOD IS HERE?
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
Ortega y Gasset made an obscure allusion to the Doctrinaires, saying they were misunderstood and were well worth studying. He mentioned none of them by name, so I looked them up and read their works. He was right.
I encountered Gustav Flaubert and many others including Albert Camus as a consequence of my studies of the Doctrinaires. Camus was trained in philosophy but he took up writing novels. He remarked in his diary that a good novelist must be a philosopher. I believed by "good" he meant immortal or something of the sort. Camus became one of my favorite authors. I read almost everything he wrote, and, given my distaste for fiction, that proves my fascination with his work - Melville is the only other novelist whose complete works I have read.
That is not to say that I enjoyed Camus' novels - I did not. His writing seemed as dry and parched as the Sahara desert. He is one of several existentialists who denied being an existentialist, and caused me to declare, "Existentialism is a dead end." But I eventually emerged from the other side of the dead end into nothing, and realized that Nothing is perfect.
I perused several marvelous critical assessments of Camus' work. I wondered why the critics were not writing novels themselves, because they certainly made Camus' novels interesting! I came to the conclusion that he was a great master because he laid down true lines for critics to wax eloquent on. Without such creative masters around, critics would not have much to say.
A dance teacher who had a reputation for giving the greatest dance class in New York happened to be the disciple of Luigi, a great master of jazz dance. But once he stopped taking classes with the maestro himself, once he gave up the lines he had learned to follow in his own way, his classes were not worth taking. I should have listened to the maestro in the first place, when he said, "Why go there when God is here?"
I shall reread Camus. Maybe I missed something.
xYx