Marvin Bell | On Bertrand Russell and Camus

Bertrand Russell with his children c1935 (public domain)

Marvin Bell in M. Bell and C. Merrill, After the Fact: Scripts and Postscripts. Buffalo NY: White Pine Press, 2016, pp. 100-101—

Bertrand Russell, May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970. An event of mind that lasted almost ninety-eight years. We shall not see his kind again, but are beset by ideologues pretending to be thinkers. I was hurrying along Broadway in the Capitol Hill District of Seattle. As I sped past two men deeply engaged in conversation as they walked, my hand bumped the wrist of one. I glanced back to say "excuse me" and kept going. But the bump must have "cleared the wax from my ears," as our teachers used to put it, and I realized that the older of the two was talking about Albert Camus. He was talking about Camus, Existentialism and meaninglessness. That was the word he used: "meaninglessness." I had overheard him say that meaninglessness was "a big idea." I couldn't just keep going. I went back and confirmed that they were indeed discussing Camus. I asked if they knew his essay on the myth of Sisyphus, who was sentenced to eternally push a boulder up to the top of a hill from where it would always roll down again. The older man (the other was much younger) said that in fact he had just been talking about Sisyphus. So I asked if he knew the very last sentence in the essay. "It's very important," I said, trying not to wag my finger. Well, he didn't, and he looked as if he wanted me to tell him, and I did. The last sentence in Camus' essay, the last of Camus' ideas about this man Sisyphus—who has been sentenced to an eternity of what seems to be meaningless suffering—is, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The older man was delighted at this information, and the younger one's eyes lit up as if he had been given permission to be cheerful. I felt like a Boy Scout of philosophy. I hadn't helped anyone across the street. I hadn't offered a way to escape the dark matter and sticky stuff. I had simply pointed out that one could live there. And I have lived there myself, largely as a fly on the wall, a bystander at the parties of the famous, a guest whose photo was taken in the movie star's bathtub, a tourist in international hot spots. We date watersheds, ages and eras, firsts and lasts, but nothing is over until no one remembers. Blessings on the lone scholar who looks again and recovers our words. Nonetheless, I have, like Bertrand Russell, no illusions. 

Albert Camus (1957), Library of Congress Prints & Photographs

Book Jacket Design | Austin Montelius

Book jacket © Austin Montelius

Above Proposed dust jacket for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, designed by Austin Montelius (2014), undergraduate at  the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, in a graphic design studio course (as taught by Roy R. Behrens).

•••

Bertrand Russell, quoted in Norman Sherry, Conrad and His World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973)—

[Joseph Conrad] thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.

•••

Anon, in Academy (February 20, 1904)—

In appearance Mr. Conrad suggests the seaman. His figure is stalwart and short, his dark beard well trimmed, and his walk nautical. Meet him near the docks and one would write him down "ship's captain" without hesitation. But his eyes, curiously distinctive and striking, mark him out from his kind. Ship captain he may be, but his eyes proclaim an artist.

A Young Lion

As recollected by British philosopher Bertrand Russell in Barry Feinberg, ed., The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 268—

On one occasion [during his childhood] after we had been talking about cannibalism, I heard my people say to each other: "When is that Eton boy coming?" and I thought they meant a boy who had been eaten. When he turned up and was a perfectly ordinary boy, it caused me the most profound disenchantment. But that was not the worst. The worst instance was when I heard them say to each other, "When is that Lyon coming?" And I said, "Is there a lion coming?" "Oh yes," they said, "and you'll see him in the drawing room and it'll be quite safe." And then they came and said, "The young Lyon has come," and they ushered me into the drawing room and it was a completely conventional young man whose name was Lyon. I burst into tears and wept the whole of the rest of the day, and the poor young man couldn't imagine why.