My version of Camus' The Plague would be wild orgies in the streets as people really and truly attempted to live: Life is Short.

My wife said life is short to me last night. I spent years wasted in engineering school jumping through endless flaming hoops thinking, "Life is short. Life is short. LIFE IS SHORT!!!! Arrgggghhhhh!"

It is short and sometimes it's well and true and good to remember this. Other times it's a saying used to justify being a crap person. It becomes a question at times of having fun verus being moral. And my wife says, "there is an edge you can walk between the two."

The question, especially with regards to the moral outrage which at times consumes me, is: Where exactly is this edge? How do we determine where the edge is?

To answer we have to know just how short is it really? This life?

But we don't know the answer to that. What we end up doing, is deciding it's different lengths depending on the situation.

My 'The Plague' would take the Life is Short concept to where it is clear just how absurd a saying it actually is.

Camus' The Plague was instead a stodgy, stolid... boring story because he was attempting to write about a solution to The Absurd with a capital 'A'. His solution being something like the protestant work ethic without the protestantism. I don't agree with him.

More exactly his solution is a choosing of atheism and deciding to not bother thinking about a certain rather extremely important part of the future (your eventual nonexistence) as opposed to adopting mysticism, which would mean adding something to yourself (adding creativity, magic, etc).

He says you can't go the route of mysticism because then you've abandoned logic and made everything truly meaningless.

I think I don't agree. The reality is that it's not such an all or nothing venture. It is questions of degrees. Both with thinking to the future; of your eventual nonexistence. And going the route of mysticism; believing in an afterlife instead of beleiving this life is a futility.

The reality is that we all pretty much do a bit of both to varying degrees. (I think we are all being highly mystical in a number of ways that most atheist do not recognize as mystical.) I can not say that Camus is absolutely wrong. But my preference is to add (to myself) instead of subtract. I would rather add some magic to reduce The Absurd instead of just not thinking about The Absurd. Because I exist to the extent I think.