Dispatches from the present
Another Iowan January, another tryst with Camus. In my classroom, these things are related. Over twelve years teaching literature to high school seniors, a two-week mini Camus unit is the only indulgence I’ve always made room for, even as course, campus and city change. It’s a trespass all educators perpetrate shamelessly—the invention of excuses to teach what we want. In my case, a little curricular rebellion to teach the implausibility of rebellion as such. The kids, for their part, don’t hate it. At least not as much as whatever I’d be making them push up a hill otherwise.
This year’s Camus excuse? A winter break that featured an unbroken series of tragicomic defeats brought on by our toddler’s precocious insomnia and concluded with a bingo-winning canceled-O’Hare-flight-plus-one-way-rental-out-of-Midway combo (read it again). We drove the final leg through a non-forecasted blizzard. I graded nothing, planned nothing and pulled up that first Monday back to a classroom that sat, horribly, just as I left it. On my desk was the official plan: under-prepped, uninspired, technically doable. The options were clear: play a miserable game of catch-up all week or reach for Old Reliable.
Day one we speedrun epistemology up through the Self. I scrawl, “How do you know what you know?” on the board and toss a book at an unsuspecting kid’s shoulder. They all sit up with bated alarm: Was that battery? Hadn’t unwanted interactive shenanigans been relegated to physics and gym? All but cracking my knuckles and reinflating an insufferable Socrates costume, I muse, “Now how sure are you I just did that?” They fall for it every year.
The sequencing gets messy. I value an onslaught approach over curricular orderliness. We talk cogito ergo sum and “existence precedes essence.” We observe Kierkegaard at his whiniest. “What exactly is this dude’s deal?” That the world is messed up, explains a peer. “Bro needs to chill.”
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes the theoretical abnegation of all meaning and value with an allegory: a spirit transforms from load-bearing camel to rebellious lion to young child. The child represents “a new beginning … a self-rolling wheel … a sacred Yes.” Total transcendence of norm and expectation. I tell kids I’m undoubtedly stuck at camel.
“I’m probably the child,” a few always declare. I furtively scan to see who nods and who rolls their eyes.
Smart teenagers without formal training are among the most eager people on the planet to be given ideas. In a secondary classroom, these particular ideas haven’t yet been labeled pop philosophy or saddled with the junk of academic discourse—and the kids haven’t yet figured out that directly mentioning certain ideas and names in educated circles signals amateurism. Thank god. Everything is just bright and new and alluring. In a difficult and often thankless profession, there can still be gifts: someone gets to hand this stuff to kids for the first time. That person is me.
Eventually comes the main event: a candid discussion about agency, purpose and rebellion. Up to this point, every word used to describe the students’ discontent has been a pejorative. Now they have an entire intellectual tradition with which to understand themselves, or misunderstand themselves. That means not just wrestling with their feeling that something is awry with the world but coming to grips with their inheritance of it. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus famously suggests that Sisyphus comes to embrace his boulder—takes possession of his lot in damnation. In possessing his burden, he quells it. Eternal damnation gives way. Clownishly, I bludgeon students with this metaphor the rest of the term ad nauseam. Whining about a calc test next period? It’s literally your boulder though. They groan with the phony dismay of a game teenager. Pedagogical triumph. I always figured these triumphs would be an eternal feature of my classroom. In recent years, they, too, have started to give way.
This spring break, half a dozen of my seniors drove to O’Hare with the intention of boarding a flight to Europe. German and French cathedrals and churches, some two hundred choir students across all grades. The exact kind of trip you’re imagining—unwieldy, expensive and logistically fraught, when things go well. This time, they did not. Upon arrival in Chicago, news broke: workers for the German airline Lufthansa announced that they had virtually shut down the Frankfurt and Munich airports for a week. Some kids had boarded a flight to another hub and were already somewhere over the Atlantic. Everyone else was stuck four hours from home, passports in hand. One contingent drove home. Others waited it out. My students were in the latter camp, milling about Chicago for days, waiting for their senior spring break to materialize.
A week later, chatting with them before the bell, I speculated whether the savior in this saga had been my class. As they had floundered there, day after day, surely they had invoked Camus? They had possessed the boulder?
Had this moment belonged to one of my classrooms gone by, this would’ve initiated an animated discussion about whether and how the philosophy applied. I’d construct a dad joke featuring yet another boulder analogy. Kids would offer up a Sisyphus-related rejoinder or playfully point out my own absurdist hypocrisies—and I would’ve had to admit to grumpily retreating from the very same airport just three months earlier, in a low-visibility blizzard, embracing at most the steering wheel.
This time though, the kids looked at me as if they’d been asked to weigh in on an optional reading assignment. No, Sisyphean embrace had not come up. Was I serious? “I mean, the hotel had a heated pool,” one girl managed. “So maybe then.”
Twelve years ago, after the Camus unit, a student took me aside and said the unit had been what he’d given up on finding in high school: that scene of storybook adolescent enlightenment the culture overpromises but rarely delivers. This is not really how Camus gets received anymore. Scenes of cinematic enlightenment have diminished to rapt amusement at best. The unit used to feel like an admission of guilt on behalf of the adult population; kids found it validating to hear their ineffable grievances named and intellectualized. But I suspect that for young Gen Zers it is no revelation to hear that the world doesn’t make any sense. Absurdism and existentialism can’t be all that cool when mom and dad and the culture at large have been telling you everything is broken since birth. The problem for Albert is that after getting to be Philosopher of the Youth for so long, he’s become just another millennial getting used to waning relevance, like me.
For a generation, relevance and relatability have been secondary education’s gateway drugs to intellectual curiosity. My students were certainly more drawn to Camus when they found him convincing, but I’m not here to spit out an annual batch of teenage absurdists. I want kids to want to talk about ideas. Whether they’ve grown more disinclined to do so of late—or whether Albert and I need to take a longer look at just how relevant our team-up is to the cause—I don’t intend to find out. Mere amusement with Camus will do. These two weeks have always been for me.
My seniors are set to graduate high school in a few weeks—the one boulder kids always manage to walk away from. As for me, I keep returning. I’m happy enough here on my hill, milling about with Camus.