Duty

“If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write, ‘I recognize only one duty, that is to love.”

― Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935–1941, p. 54

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. There’s a lot of fascinating history about this day, if you don’t know it, I suggest you read the Wikipedia page for some background: Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Since I’m not a native born American, I didn’t ever celebrate the day growing up, and didn’t really understand its meaning, not to mention much of the cultural history or American Civil Rights Movements at all. It’s a sad gap in my education, one that I have been trying to fix, and am slowly beginning to understand, especially through the lens of current events.

Dr. King and Camus maybe don’t have a lot in common from first glance, but I think they were both passionate for peace and justice and they did both win Nobel Prizes, albeit for different things. I thought about looking for an MLK quote for today, or going down to the MLK Memorial and getting a photo to include, but I remembered something I had read about the two of them, and their parallels several years back, and a little Googling later I found it.

I’m not going to try and repeat what the author of the link below has so eloquently put, but he uses the same quote (although quoted by someone else, I won’t use a quote if I can’t source it directly to Camus’ books, which I’ve done here), and I thought it fitting for today and the man we’re honoring (hopefully) in the United States today.

Go read this:

Albert Camus: The Plague and an Ethic of Nonviolence
Delivered as part of the Charles Lecture Series
Earlham College 1998

http://legacy.earlham.edu/~tonyb/bing_charles1.html

-DA