Albert Camus
Though he denied it quite often, Camus was called a philosopher along with being an editor, playwright, director, novelist, journalist, political essayist and activist.
Existentialist topics were in his earliest writings, a 1942 philosophical essay - The Myth of Sisyphus and in the 1951 essay - The Rebel. He wrote many popular novels - The Stranger , The Plague amongst others and a collection of short stories - Exile and the Kingdom in 1957.
The Growing Stone
The Growing Stone is a short story by the French writer Albert Camus. It is the final short story in the collection Exile and the Kingdom.
A French engineer, D’Arrast arrives in a town in Iguape, Brazil, where he is commissioned to construct a sea-wall to prevent flooding. The chief of police in a drunk state checks his belongings and accuses him of holding a fake passport. The kind town dwellers and other dignitaries manage to solve the issue. They apologise on behalf of the chief of police and ask D’Arrast what kind of punishment he would like to give him. But D’Arrast lets the matter go.
At this point the story shows the empathy the protagonist has and the direction the story takes.
On further visits to the town, he observes the poverty and the resentment they have towards the rich, their side of town and towards the dignitaries, including him. The story shows the rich vs poor life the town has.
There is a religious festival and a procession related to an incident which happened long ago. Someone had found a floating statue of Jesus in the local river. They had put it in a cave and a stone was believed to have grown there. A meeting with a local sailor reveals to them a promise he had made to God for pulling him to safety from drowning one night. The promise is that the sailor would carry a heavy stone in the religious procession.
This has a Christian symbolism, and refers to the saying of Jesus where he preaches that one has to carry one’s cross ( difficulties and burdens of life) with patience and perseverance just as he had carried his cross on the path to his death by Roman soldiers.
But after an evening of partying and dancing, the sailor is unable to carry the stone in the next day’s procession. Seeing this, D’Arrast decides to fulfil the sailor’s promise on his behalf. But while he walks and struggles, the stone seems to grow heavier, testing his patience, the motive of doing it and the end goal.
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