Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. So listen to these last three episodes

we've done recently on Albert Camus. You can hear some of the terms he's been thrown around,

like solidarity, rebellion, lucidity. You can hear these things and be on board with what he's saying

in theory. But it's quite another thing to be able to apply these things to your life in any

sort of real way. I mean, you can theoretically understand. You could be looking at the world in a more

life-affirming way. But look, you can't just all of a sudden be like, oh, I get it now. I just

got to be more lucid about stuff. That's what's been missing from my life this whole time. No, to Camus, you don't just think your way into a more

lucid framing of your reality. This is something that in many ways a person has to arrive at

through lived experience, that much like in the work of Dostoevsky, or the religious mystics

we've talked about, or even certain lines of Zen Buddhism on the podcast lately, there's certain

insights about what it is to be a human being that can only be

arrived at by experiencing them directly. And to Camus, one of these important experiences

that you've got to have in your life, but that a lot of people spend most of their lives

running away from is what he's going to call the experience of exile. Now, just to understand

what he's talking about here, let's start with an example of exile that's

far too extreme, and then we'll readjust from there. Imagine being a member of a village deep in the

jungle somewhere, you know, lots of people in this village of yours, and let's say one day you do

something that makes everyone in this village really mad at you. They all decide they've had enough

of your genius behavior for one lifetime,

and they cast you out into the jungle and say to never come back. Now, when you're out there in the

jungle all by yourself, you know, eating leaves, rubbing sticks together, jaguars circling in the

background, well, this is not a good feeling, this feeling of exile from the safety of the community

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