Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. So today we're going to start talking about Albert Camus and how perfectly he fits into this conversation we've been having lately.

So when people talk about Camus, a lot of people know about his book, The Stranger. I mean, it's one of the most famous books in history. It's expected.

But not as many people know about something else that's exciting from him, which is a book he wrote just before he wrote The Stranger. It's a book that he chose to

never publish during his lifetime, for reasons we'll see. It was only published after his death

by his estate. But nonetheless, if your goal was to understand Camus the best you could,

then reading this book in particular is going to be important for knowing how his thinking

was evolving during the late 1930s.

And this book has context in it that's often missed if you want to understand his full project as a thinker.

The book is called a happy death.

And it's a book that surprisingly, of all things, mostly focuses on the idea of happiness.

Now, if you're confused here a little bit, you have good right to be.

I mean, why would Camus start, write and finish a book about happiness,

then choose to never publish it, then to only have his next book be written about a character

who seems to care almost nothing about happiness?

Well, we'll understand why by the end of this here today.

I mean, if you're reading The Stranger, if that's the reason you came to this episode,

just in the first few pages of this book, you'll notice it's written from the perspective of a guy named Merceau,

and that this guy Mersault is a character that's famously indifferent to the state of the world around him.

You've no doubt heard the first line of this book.

People will have a connyption fit talking about it.

Mother died yesterday or was it the day before?

I can't remember.

...