1940

1940 is the historical threshold at which the book’s philosophical inquiry and its later reflections on art, history, and responsibility become inseparable. Written amid the French and European disaster, it confronts the question of whether life has meaning without appealing to eternal values and answers the problem of suicide with a refusal: even without belief in God, suicide is not legitimate. The year therefore marks not a retreat from nihilism into consolation, but an attempt to find, within its limits, the means to proceed beyond it.

Historical Crisis and Philosophical Beginning

1940 gives the book its immediate atmosphere of catastrophe. Its central problem is presented as the legitimacy of asking whether life has meaning and, consequently, the necessity of meeting suicide face to face. The argument proceeds without the support of eternal values, which are described as temporarily absent or distorted in contemporary Europe. In that setting, the absurd is not treated as a final philosophical conclusion but as a starting point: the book offers a provisional description, in its pure state, of an intellectual malady, without committing itself at first to a metaphysic or a belief.

This historical placement also explains the book’s movement from diagnosis to affirmation. The work does not deny the intellectual pressure produced by nihilism; instead, it asks how a person can continue to live and create when inherited guarantees no longer command assent. Its final orientation is therefore an invitation to live lucidly and to create in the midst of what is figured as a desert. 1940 is the year in which that invitation acquires its full urgency, because the crisis is not abstract: it is the condition in which the argument was written.

War, History, and the Loss of Distance

The historical meaning of 1940 becomes more concrete in the recollection of Tipasa. On 2 September 1939, the narrator had not gone to Greece as planned; war had come instead, and later spread to Greece itself. The interruption of that journey becomes a condensed image of the period’s rupture: personal movement, youthful expectation, and access to beauty are all displaced by collective violence. The distance between the warm ruins of youth and the later, fenced-off landscape is presented as an inner distance as well as a historical one.

The changed appearance of Tipasa makes the transformation visible. The ruins that had once been freely explored are surrounded by barbed wire, accessible only through designated openings, and guarded by official authority; night visits are forbidden. Rain covers the site when the narrator returns, and the sarcophaguses hold black water beneath sodden tamarisks. These details turn a remembered place of beauty and freedom into a landscape marked by regulation, war, and historical exhaustion. The barbed wire becomes a direct emblem of the tyrannies, police forces, and era of revolt that have intervened between youth and the present.

The return also destroys the hope of simply recovering the past. The narrator had sought a remembered strength that once made acceptance possible after recognizing what could not be changed, but time cannot be reversed and the vanished world cannot be restored. Beauty, plenty, and youth belong to an innocence that was not consciously possessed while it lasted. After the conflagrations and the collapse of empires, the world seems suddenly aged, and those who inhabit it have aged with it. The historical crisis thus changes not only circumstances but consciousness: innocence has become unavailable, while guilt is experienced without deliberate intention.

The Artist Within the Age

In the wartime present, the artist can no longer claim serene detachment. Earlier artists could create amid historical violence while preserving an apparent distance from it, but the contemporary artist is described as mobilized along with everyone else. The trenches crush forms, metaphors, and prayers, and the eternal loses ground each time creation is destroyed by steel. The year 1940 therefore marks a condition in which artistic work must acknowledge that it is embedded in history rather than sheltered above it.

This does not reduce art to political instruction. The artist is not required simply to write about co-operatives, nor to suppress the suffering of others in order to preserve aesthetic purity. As artists, people may seem to have no need to interfere in worldly affairs; as human beings, however, they are called toward miners exploited or shot down, prisoners in camps, colonized people, and the persecuted throughout the world. The artist’s responsibility arises from contact with their silence and humiliation, not from a program that would replace creation with social preaching.

The pressure of 1940 enters artistic language itself. A life engaged with the persecuted gives speech a particular tone, even when the work speaks of deserts or selfish love rather than public struggle. Creation and humanity are not treated as competing values: the greatness of an artist depends on maintaining their balance, and the historical pressure of the period forces that tension into life as well as into art. The year thus becomes a test of whether artistic independence can coexist with solidarity without sacrificing either.

From Nihilism to Responsibility

The book’s response to 1940 is neither faith in an unseen resolution nor acceptance of every historical necessity. The later political discussion rejects the idea that oppression becomes justifiable merely because it follows the direction of history. There are no privileged executioners; all executioners belong to the same family. This rejection preserves a moral boundary precisely where the age’s violence attempts to erase one.

The same refusal governs the choice between contemplation and action. The narrator presents the choice as a severe wrench: one may live with time and die with it, or seek escape into a greater life grounded in eternity. He chooses time because history offers certainty in the form of the force that crushes him, while refusing to disguise that choice with nostalgia or bitterness. The historical year therefore does not simply destroy transcendence; it compels an explicit decision about whether to remain with the world’s wounds or evade them.

1940 is consequently both a date and a method of reading the book. It explains why the absurd begins as an intellectual diagnosis, why suicide is rejected without recourse to eternal values, why the return to Tipasa becomes an encounter with barbed wire rather than recovered innocence, and why the artist is drawn toward those humiliated by everyday history. The year gives the work its governing contradiction: the world has lost its guarantees, yet that loss does not authorize surrender. It demands lucid participation, creation, and an active refusal to let catastrophe become the final meaning of human life.