"...the most important experience of recent days has been my rereading of Camus's The Stranger. As you know, it's not a cheerful book and yet I'm indebted to it for a few moments of great joy, that special and elevating kind of joy I always feel on encountering a supreme work of art. Part of it is the sensation that it is 'just right,' exactly as it should be; in other words a feeling that I too might have written it, or even that I did write it myself. It may sound silly to put it so baldly, but I'm sure you understand what I mean. It's simply an inner identification that you can feel equally well when looking at a painting or listening to a piece of music, even though you are not a painter or composer yourself. Moreover this book has many dimensions and it merged, in an interesting way, with my own thoughts on responsibility. The stranger is not a man without responsibilities, he is merely a man who refuses to conform to conventional order, i.e., to the conventional structure of duties, and he feels obligated to accept only those duties that are an authentic expression of his own sense of responsibility."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
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