If you are not familiar with Camus' work, I highly recommend reading the essay collection Nuptials (Nuptials at Tipasa, The Wind at Djémila, Summer in Algiers a

If you are not familiar with Camus' work, I highly recommend reading the essay collection Nuptials (Nuptials at Tipasa, The Wind at Djémila, Summer in Algiers and The Desert). It was written in 1936, when Camus was in his early twenties; several years before he articulated his "philosophie de l'absurde" in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. Camus himself described Noces as belonging to a pre-absurdist "pagan" phase. It describes, in beautifully poetic french, the intense, sensual love of physical existence and the here-and-now that gives the absurd its stakes. A quote from Nuptials at Tipasa: In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flower-covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone. At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. The eyes try in vain to perceive anything but drops of light and colors trembling on the lashes. [...] I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.