Consequently, there is but one possible realistic film: the one that is constantly shown us by an invisible camera on the world’s screen. The only realistic artist, then, is God, if he exists. All other artists are, ipso facto, unfaithful to reality.
As a result, the artists who reject bourgeois society and its formal art, who insist on speaking of reality, and reality alone, are caught in a painful dilemma. They must be realistic and yet cannot be. They want to make their art subservient to reality, and reality cannot be described without effecting a choice that makes it subservient to the originality of an art.
For a hundred and fifty years the writers belonging to a mercantile society, with but few exceptions, thought they could live in happy irresponsibility. They lived, indeed, and then died alone, as they had lived. But we writers of the twentieth century shal never again be alone. Rather, we must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so. But we must do so for al those who are suffering at this moment, whatever may be the glories, past or future, of the States and parties oppressing them: for the artist there are no privileged torturers. This is why beauty, even today, especialy today, cannot serve any party; it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men’s suffering or their liberty. The only realy committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a free-lance.
And I cannot agree, for example, with those who complain today of the decline of wisdom. Apparently they are right. Yet, to tel the truth, wisdom has never declined so much as when it involved no risks and belonged exclusively to a few humanists buried in libraries. But today, when at last it has to face real dangers, there is a chance that it may again stand up and be respected.
Some wil say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by milions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all
From Camus - Create Dangerously speech/ essay - PDF here