Tuberculosis killed two months

World War II was in its final stages. One day in April, the most famous British correspondent, George Orwell, had an appointment with the most famous French writer, Albert Camus, in the most famous café in Paris at that time, and until now: Domago. Orwell, the shy Englishman, waited for an hour, then two hours, then three hours, but the Frenchman, who was also known for his guard and politeness, never came. Orwell left the café broken-hearted and did not learn until later that what had prevented Camus from making the appointment was that the man had tuberculosis. They both had the same disease. Orwell will die of bloodshot wounds and Camus will be killed in a sad car accident after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in one year.

There was a lot of similarity between the two men: they were attached to the same moral values, they were warriors of totalitarian regimes, they defended the weak and the poor everywhere. They both believed that truth was more important than blind loyalty and metaphysics, and therefore it stemmed from the real world and not from the world of ideas and theories. They were similar even in their style, which was characterized by clarity, frankness, and honesty. When Orwell died in 1950, Camus wrote to his friend Maria Cazares a letter in which he said: “The news is sad today: George Orwell has died. You don’t know him. A great talented English writer, his experiences are equal to mine, and his ideas coincide with mine. “He fought tuberculosis for many years, and he is one of the very few men who are of the same mind.”

There is no doubt that Orwell’s most important work is the novel “1984”, and perhaps the most important thing in it is the number of words that Orwell added to the English language. Many see it as the greatest gift to humanity because he was the first to talk about police state control in the future, and the first to warn against the power of “fake news,” which we now live with every day. He wrote at the time: There will come a day when anyone who says that (2 + 2) equals 4 will be punished with death. The strange thing is that the one who said these words is not Orwell at all. Rather, he borrowed it from Camus’s novel “The Plague,” which was published two years before “1984,” in 1947. The mysterious similarity does not end here. Rather, we will read an article by Orwell in which he criticizes the works of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, saying: “It seems that we are sliding with certain speed towards an era that is collecting… Two to two makes five, if it occurs to the ruler to say so.”

The moral positions of both men led to disagreements with fellow writers of the era. Jean Boursat strongly criticized Camus’s novel The Rebel, and this sparked hostility between the two. They both fought fascism and communism together. They both considered absolute truth to be an illusion. Therefore, Orwell said that truth is nothing but a prevailing mentality, not a logical theory. He wrote: “Truth is mysterious, a fugitive that must always be pursued.” They both believed that the truth was a peak that could not be reached, but that it was worth the effort of reaching it.