Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It’s unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn’t really feeling it. (The only exception to this pattern appears to be, for some reason, France, where Gérard de Nerval used to walk a pet lobster on a leash and where Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline.)

Ms. Jones, who had previously edited translations of the French philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the Child book opened a new career path, editing culinary writers: James Beard and Marion Cunningham on American fare, Madhur Jaffrey (Indian food), Claudia Roden (Middle Eastern), Edna Lewis (Southern), Lidia Bastianich and Marcella Hazan (Italian), and many others.

Il ne s’enracinerait nulle part, il ne s’encombrerait d’aucune possession : non pour se garder vainement disponible, mais afin de témoigner de tout.

la passion tranquille et forcenée qui le jetait vers ses livres à venir

Sartre au contraire essayait de me situer dans mon propre système, il me comprenait à la lumière de mes valeurs, de mes projets

celle de l’univers entier

L’œuvre d’art, l’œuvre littéraire était à ses yeux une fin absolue ; elle portait en soi sa raison d’être

théorie de la contingence

C’était la première fois de ma vie que je me sentais intellectuellement dominée par quelqu’un.

la contingence n’était pas une notion abstraite, mais une dimension réelle du monde : il fallait utiliser toutes les ressources de l’art pour rendre sensible au cœur cette secrète « faiblesse » qu’il apercevait dans l’homme et dans les choses

Il aimait autant Stendhal que Spinoza et se refusait à séparer la philosophie de la littérature.

« Rien n’a besoin de moi, rien n’a besoin de personne, parce que rien n’a besoin d’être. 

Aujourd’hui seulement, je recompose son histoire avec un peu de cohérence.

rien n’a besoin d’être

Quel silence ! La terre roulait dans un espace que nul regard ne transperçait, et perdue sur sa surface immense, au milieu de l’éther aveugle, j’étais seule.

Camus follows Sartre's definition on the absurd, absurd is "That which is meaningless. Thus man's existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification".[71] The absurd is created because of the realization of man, who is placed into an unintelligent universe, that human values are not founded on a solid external component; or as Camus himself explains, the absurd is the result of the "confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world".[74] Even though absurdity is inescapable, Camus does not drift towards nihilism. But the realization of absurdity leads to the question: why someone should continue to live? Suicide is an option that Camus firmly dismisses as the renunciation of human values and freedom. Rather than, he proposes we accept that absurdity is a part of our lives and live with it.

Sartre argued that a central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals—independently acting and responsible, conscious beings ("existence")—rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit ("essence"). The actual life of the individuals is what constitutes what could be called their "true essence" instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life.[27]