Albert Camus
Albert Camus felt that the literature of his time did not pay enough attention to landscapes. It might have been for this reason that both essay volumes, but especially Noces, place landscapes in the center of attention. The four lyrical essays in Noces, organized along the alternate themes of life and death, nature and culture, can be considered prose poems. "Nuptials at Tipasa"), The Wind in Djemila", Summer in Algiers", and "The Desert" praise the marriage of man, time, and space. No matter how fragile happiness is, the small port city of Tipasa with its Roman ruins incites its visitor to risk a hymn to life. A "dead town," Djemila bathes in relentless sun and wind, a splendidly vulgar landscape forcing its visitor to an arid lucidity. While he is constantly reminded of death, he finds in the stones the telling silence and indifference of beauty. Worth mentioning in a research paper is that the monotony of Algiers is especially visible in August, but the people's simple desires and fast pace of life teach him that one thing only is more tragic than suffering and it is the life of a happy man.
In contrast, the mineral grandeur of desertscapes is reflected on the faces of many Mediterranean people whose lives and characters have been shaped by indifference and placidity. The narrator's memories of Italy and Spain, where nature and culture form a perfect union, make him discover that happiness is born from the absence of hope ... mind finds its reason in the body. Custom essay hint: Like L'Envers et l'endroit, Noces contains the nucleus of most key thoughts which Camus developed in his later works. Chief among them is the notion of measure which Le Mythe de Sisyphe informally and L'Homme revolte formally link to "affirmative negation": Florence, Pisa, and, especially, the ethereal painted faces of Piero della Francesca reveal to him once and forever that If it is true that every truth contains its own bitterness, it is also true that every negation contains a blossoming of "yes".