Excess Of Love Poem by gershon hepner

Excess of love belongs to saints,
and societies’ excess
of hatred is the norm––restraints
on people who oppress
unusual as on any saintly
lover. More is sometimes less
in love, which may seem quaintly
like hatred when we decompress.

Uncomfortable in any skin,
can I avoid the passion of
all hatred, even that of sin,
and as for passion born of love,
can I make sure that when it ends
it isn’t transformed into hate
when decompressing, for the bends
distress and discombobulate?

Richard Eder reviews Albert Camus’s “Notebooks: 1951–1958, ” translated by Ryan Bloom (“Uncomfortable in His Skin, Thriving in His Mind, ” NYT, June 25,2008) :
Albert Camus was one of the two pillars of postwar French literature. The other was Jean-Paul Sartre, his comrade in letters if not quite in arms (during the Resistance, Camus dangerously put out a clandestine newspaper, while Sartre stayed safely studying and writing) . Then in the early 1950s, they bitterly split. Camus’s pillar stood in Paris, but in a sense it belonged elsewhere: perhaps among the Corinthian columns in North Africa’s Hellenistic ruins. He was a French Algerian, of course, but the point isn’t his provenance but his temperament. He was Mediterranean, a creature of sun and water, fierceness and the senses. In Paris, with its cool symmetries, he was, to adapt a French saying, uncomfortable in his skin — the constricting ideological precision that Sartre and his fellow intellectuals fitted on him. They treated him as a marvel, and then when he rebelled against their leftist rigor, they condemned him. This odd unsuitability, both of emotions and the mind, comes to life in the third and last volume of Camus’s notebooks, appearing in an English translation (by Ryan Bloom) 19 years after they came out in French. The split took place when Camus took issue with the absolutism of revolutions. Seeking to realize their ideals, he argued, they end up using violence and tyranny. It was an attack on Soviet Communism at a time when Sartre and his followers were becoming its increasingly rigid supporters. They insisted that overt repression, however repellent, was the only way to fight the insidious structural tyranny of colonialist capitalism. One must choose, painfully. No we mustn’t, Camus rejoined: neither be killers nor victims. In his notebooks Camus excoriates “the newly achieved revolutionary spirit, nouveau riche, and Pharisees of justice.” He names Sartre and his followers, “who seem to make the taste for servitude a sort of ingredient of virtue.” He mocks their conformism: cowardly, besides, he implies, citing the story of a child who announced her plan to join “the cruelest party.” Because: “If my party is in power, I’ll have nothing to fear, and if it is the other, I’ll suffer less since the party which will persecute me will be the less cruel one.” Camus writes more generally: “Excess in love, indeed the only desirable, belongs to saints. Societies, they exude excess only in hatred. This is why one must preach to them an intransigent moderation.”

6/25/08