Five Things That Stayed With Me — January

Books, perfume, essentials

I’ve never been drawn to lists for their own sake. But lately, as attention fragments and urgency flattens everything into the same register, I’ve found myself holding on to a few things with unusual clarity. This is not a roundup of “best of” or new discoveries, but a record of what stayed with me, what I returned to, what calmed me, what sharpened my senses in the first month of the new year.

1. Albert Camus and Maria Casarès: Letters

Letters demand duration, attention, and risk. Writing to someone you care about is a discipline of feeling and a way of crystallizing your thoughts about another person and, inevitably, about yourself. In that sense, the correspondence between Albert Camus and Maria Casarès is extraordinary. I read it as a sustained narrative unfolding between 1944 and 1959, shaped by separation, longing, and restraint. And in contrast to what you might expect, I read it for the voice of Maria Casarès.

Maria Casarès in 1947 (studio Harcourt)

Camus and Casarès met in Paris on June 6, 1944, the day of the Normandy landings. Both were exiles: Casarès had fled Spain as a teenager; Camus had left Algeria for France just before the Nazi invasion. Their relationship began amid theater—she in a leading role in Le Malentendu, his play—and ended abruptly when Camus’s wife returned to Paris after the liberation. They reunited in 1948, and their affair continued intermittently for more than a decade, sustained largely through letters.

Casarès emerges as a sensitive and lucid writer in her own right, creating through letters a world she could inhabit alone or with Camus, in memory, imagination, and language. As someone who has known estrangement from home and from loved ones, I recognize both the impulse and the ache.

The letters were written in French and later translated into English. If you read French or Spanish, I highly recommend Casarès’s autobiographical writing, Résidente privilégiée. I will share one passage from it here, translated by me. I haven’t felt such immediate affinity with a literary voice in a long time:

“Like life itself, war is not a sequence of facts or events placed end to end. However striking they may be, such facts can only inform us as signs: just as coughing up blood warns of tuberculosis, or a tumor of cancer; just as the shape of a nose or the color of eyes merely helps us imagine a face, or a remembered caress allows us to guess at love. But neither tuberculosis nor cancer, neither love nor a person, resides in the blood spat out, the tumor, the recollection of a gesture, or the features of a face. The experience of war is inexpressible and can only be understood if the one who listens to its account has lived it.”

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