AES103 An Invincible Summer

I discovered once more at Tipasa that one must keep intact in oneself a freshness, a cool well-spring of joy, love the day that escapes injustice, and return to combat having won that fight.

Here I recaptured the old beauty, a young sky,

And I measured my luck, realising at last that in the worst years of our madness,

The memory of that sky never left me.

This was what in the end kept me from despairing.

There the world began over again every day in an ever new light

O light!

This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate

This last resort was ours too, and I knew it now.

In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me...

An invincible summer.

-Albert Camus-

When Albert Camus came back from serving with the French Resistance in WW2, he went to a town called Tipasa where he lived as a child. Desperately trying to recapture the feelings of peacefulness and simple childlike joy that he lost during the war. After a long search, he finally discovered that the lost feelings he was looking for wasn’t somewhere out there in some far off place, it was already within him just waiting to be rediscovered.