'Why both Sartre and Camus should have been so keenly aware of the absurd about the same time is one of those mysteries of the zeitgeist time spirit: that we are still far from solving. Camus grew up in a Fraco-Spanish working-class setting in North Africa and was a student at a provincial university of Algiers. Sartre was bourgeois, a member of the well-established Schweitzer family, and graduated from the Ecole Normals Superieure in Paris as a member of the intellectual elite. Both, as it happened, were fatherless from infancy, but one was a poor white in a Mediterranean country, the other privileged scholar at the heart of the metropolis.

 Camus always had a strongly lyrical feeling for the material world-sunlight, sea, sex- so that his consciousness of the absurd was an intermittent feeling, occurring only in moments of metaphysical interrogation. Also, as he came from the working classs, he did not look upon it so much as a social stratum but rather as a highly differentiated reality, made up of irreducible individuals. In other words, his inintellectualism, which was genuine and had moreover been developed by philosophical studies at the university level, was tempered by pragmatism and a sense of inarticualate values. Poverty, tuberculosis, and a feeling for human solidarity made him much more of an ordinary man than Sartre, the ferociously dedicated intellectual, whose whose professed aim is to translate everything into words, so that formulated truths can react on society.

 Although an indefatigable opponent of bourgeois education, Sartre has a built-in conviction of his own superioirty, and he always treated Camus with spontaneous condescension. Whereas Camus tried to learn from experience and felt his way slowly from position to position, Sartre has always been consumed with a desire to build a philosophical framework that would supersede reality.'

I'm sorry for throwing such a long one to you guys, but I really would like to understand it... please help me Thanx