In an early essay, Camus reveals the impact his childhood home had on his life. The story's narrator sits in an otherwise empty Arab café in Algiers as night falls, deep in thought about the "child who lived in a poor neighbourhood". He recalls his old house so well that he could go back there on the darkest night and climb the unlit stairs "without stumbling once... His legs retain the exact height of the steps; his hand, the instinctive, never-conquered horror of the banister. Because of the cockroaches." The vermin came with the territory, as did the shadows and smells.

But the territory was veined with other and better memories as well. Belcourt was to interwar Algiers what the Lower East Side was to New York City: a densely populated neighbourhood of poor but not destitute workers and artisans, professionals and shopkeepers, attracted to the host country by its credo of equality and opportunity. Most of the residents of Belcourt were European immigrants known as pieds noirs: Spaniards, Italians, Maltese, and a sizable Jewish community. The broad boulevards such as rue de Lyon were lined with ficus trees and laced with trolley lines, while the narrow streets were thick with small shops, workshops, and tenements, with knots of children playing canette vinga (a cross between tennis and stickball), all the while dodging pedestrians, street vendors, stray dogs, and squawking chickens.

The sea offered Camus and his friends an escape from the pounding summer heat of the city. It is a rare work by Camus that is not instilled with the author's abiding love of the Mediterranean. His literary characters, from Meursault in The Stranger to Rieux in The Plague or Cormery in The First Man, all find in the sea reprieve from the sound and fury of society. So, too, does Camus: only when he swims in the waters, then drops to the sand on the beaches of the Mediterranean does he become at one with the world. Under this sun, he "dons no mask". The Mediterranean is a philosophical no less than a physical state, elevated by Camus to the symbol of an ancient world of human values and thought, profane, clasping the earth, a world he erected against the overreaching and dry ideologies he associated with the grey landscapes of urban Europe.

Camus in fact discovered two worlds: one of material poverty, which clung to the spare and tattered family possessions in Belcourt, the other of spiritual wealth, found in the waves breaking in the distance and star-strewn sky sweeping over his head. His work and life were filled with the tension he felt between the kingdoms of scarcity and fullness, of society and nature; he had a palpable sense that he himself straddled the two realms. At night, the young Camus would gaze out the apartment window that gave onto the street: though overwhelmed by the smell of the "stinking corridor" behind him and the feel of the rotten seat bottom fraying under him, at the same time, "with eyes raised, he drank in the pure night."

For Camus, the most overpowering memory of childhood was of silence. The grandmother, Catherine Sintes, a widow, bitter and violent, was unlettered and laconic; with Camus and his brother she often expressed herself with slaps and whippings rather than words. Uncle Etienne had been mute until his early teens; after an operation, he was able to speak, but only haltingly and simply. And his mother, also named Catherine, was illiterate and partly deaf. According to a family tradition, Catherine had been perfectly at ease speaking as a young woman; it was only in 1914, after she received news of the death of her husband, that her speech was hobbled.

It was when she lost her husband and her tongue that Catherine Camus lost what little freedom she had had. With the infant Albert and the toddler Lucien, she moved back in with her mother in Belcourt. She spent the rest of her life working long hours as a cleaning woman, returning to a home ruled by a harsh matriarch and to two sons whom she loved but was scarcely able to protect, much less nurture. When the grandmother grabbed her whip and began to beat one of the children, Catherine stood to one side, pleading only that she not strike him on the head. She was there, yet as elusive as the father Camus never knew; she was indispensable, but silent like the world that refused to surrender meaning; she filled her son's life, though the nature of her presence was forever an enigma.

When we are stripped down to a certain point, Camus wrote, "hope and despair are equally groundless and the whole of life can be summed up in an image." For Camus, that image almost certainly was his mother. Even more than the sea, the figure of the silent mother occupies the centre of Camus's writings: it is the sun, or perhaps the dark matter, toward which everything else is pulled.

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Is that something I said to my husband too? No, sweetheart. I did not mean him to feel good when he was in bed with me. And that was the trouble really... somehow I couldn't resolve myself to make him feel good with me, though he did everything to please me, poor man, undertook every kind of sacrifice for my sake. He broke with his family, with society, with all his usual ways. When he came to me it was really like emigrating, the way some bankrupt man-about-town sets out on a sea voyage to a faraway land. Maybe that was exactly why I could never reconcile myself to him; he just wasn't at home with me... All the time he was with me it was as if he had run away to an exciting, spicy, hot country like Brazil and married some local woman. Does such a person ever wonder how he got there? And when he is with that local woman, even at the most intimate moments, isn't his mind elsewhere? Isn't he thinking of home? Perhaps. It made me nervous. That was why I didn't want him to feel too good when we were together at table or in bed.

What was that home he was thinking about? Where was it? Was it his first wife? I don't think so. Home, real home, is not to be found on maps, you know. But home stands for a great deal, not just good and lovely things, but hateful, contrary things too. We are learning that lesson ourselves now, aren't we, now that we no longer have a home? Don't imagine we'll get it back by paying the odd home visit... There'll be goodbyes and tears, some will feel heartbroken, some will strut about proudly waving their new foreign passports while paying a bill with their traveller's cheque... But the home one thinks about when abroad, that has gone for good. It seems home is not just a region, a town, an hour or people, but a feeling. What's that? Are there eternal feelings? No, dear, I don't think so. You know very well I adore you but if one day I stopped adoring you because you have cheated on me or gone off with someone... impossible, yes? In other words if that happened please don't think my heart will break. We will carry on having charming conversations... but that is one thing we won't talk about because whatever there had been between us will have been over, vanished into thin air. No time for mourning. There is only ever one home in your life, like love, the one true love. And it passes like love, like true love. And it's right it should be like that otherwise it would be beyond bearing.

That first woman, my husband's first wife... she was a refined lady. Very beautiful, very self-controlled. It was her self-control I most envied. That seems to be one of those things you can't learn or buy with money. It's something you're born with. It may be that the stuff these strange people, the rich, so piously cultivate is nothing more than self-discipline. Their blood cells, their very glands, were all under control. I hated this capacity in them and my husband knew I hated it. It was precisely because his first wife was cultured and self-controlled that my husband left her one day. He had grown tired of self-control. I was more than just a woman for him: I was a trial, a rehearsal, an adventure, both hunt and prey, a form of fraud, the kind of act when someone in polite society suddenly spits on the carpet. The devil knows what these things mean. I'll fetch a cognac, a three-star bottle, all right? I've grown thirsty with all this talking.

Drink, my dear. There, you see how I drink? I put my lips to where your lips have touched the glass... You see my husband never made tender gestures like this. We never once drank from the same glass while looking into each other's eyes as we are doing now... If he wanted to please me he would buy me a ring... yes, that nice ring with the turquoise stone, the one you were looking just now with such fascination, that too was a present from him... What's that, darling? Fine, you can take it, have the ring valued as you did the others at that first rate valuer of yours. You shall have whatever you want.

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Translated by George Szirtes.

My doll collection of bitty loves have had to work hard, over the years and in tandem, to amount to anything when lined up side by side that you might dignify as a first love. I had to work hard for them, because they mumbled, you see. Did they speak grippingly of Dante, or of large Maremma sheepdogs that had trudged day and night across snowy slopes to be reunited with a mate? No. Perhaps I was like my grandmother, who after a lifetime in Alexandria and propelled one-way to the swampy foggy north of Italy, yearned for okra in a land of peas. But unlike her, I could turn anything into anything, including peas into okra.

I fell in love with an uncle at the age of five because he seemed to be having a good time elsewhere, unlike my grandmother who was always having a terrible time with us, berating Nasser any time he had the misfortune of coming up in the news, embroidering dazzling cushions, and scowling as she did so. Someone tied that uncle's cherries in clusters of two and three with invisible black thread so he wouldn't have to pick them up one at a time, which, as anyone then living in Milan might have told you, he was in too much of a rush to do. He whizzed about, up, down and across Italy, to France and Turkey, dipping yachts and flats and pieds-á-terre and bulky mansions in a shade of oyster-shell, concealing cupboards and drawers and cabinets so that things that weren't in the minimalist modernist next-to-nothingness he aspired to might be expunged. I got over him when I met my first communist, who was always rushing into, or out of a CHI-chi, as he pronounced the two syllables in Italian that stood for "convegno comunista" or something like that. He wrote to me in turquoise ink and the letters lasted a long time because I coudn't make out half the words: they were swallowed up in dancing globs of turquoise. I made more of them, invariably – kept them in a pocket of the scratchy grey boarding-school uniform in Florence, next to some bit of Allen Ginsberg I was translating for a printed-in-every-direction literary magazine called Pianeta fresco. My second communist (they were rife) had a big black beard and a big black motorcycle. I had one scary ride, in the permitted twice-yearly leave from the dungeon, along a winding Florentine road flanked by stone walls, some scratchy kisses, and the thought of those too I rationed and stretched and watered down till even the most ilusionada of ilusionadas would have banged the shutters to and called it a day.

I'd like to skip the Latin beast with webbed fingers. And the poet with a mouse up his nose when he read his poems to me. Even I could do little there.

A dashing architect's mother thought I must have a wooden leg since I wore long black dresses I bought at the flea market. I studied and gawked at the Polaroid of a dark-haired well-suited stranger I'd only met once. I stared at the wall without a door that mooning over a homosexual so resembles – they are good dolls since they talk back and make you tea but touch your bare back only by mistake. L'amour platonique, my mother said, "est plat et pas très tonique".

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We are not monads. We constantly interact, and when engaging in conflict, and even hatred, we undergo a process of socialization that makes us competent individuals. Simmel uses a pictorial metaphor to distinguish static from conflictual societies. The society of saints which Dante Alighieri sees in his Rose of Paradise is a centripetal depiction of pure unification, but it is unreal as it lacks a life process, and shows no sign of possible change or development. By contrast, the holy assembly of the Church Fathers in Raphael's Disputa shows a considerable differentiation of moods and thoughts, from which vitality flows. Unfortunately, such conflict can be stretched and turned into all-encompassing forms of justification or techniques of neutralization. These techniques help deny the harm caused by our conduct, and serve the purpose of declaring our loyalty to "superior" values and a future "superior" order of things. Our first love, therefore, though meshed with hate for the present system, was projected toward the constitution of a new one. Some even linked the idea of a new system to that of a "new man". This is where serious trouble started.

Inspired by a univocal concept of conflict, groups of political activists started to see their violence as a noble response to the violence inherent in the status quo. In their view, "bad" institutionalized violence had to be followed by "good" violence, which was legitimated by its evil progenitor. What was proposed was a bellicose foundation for peace: the good war will put an end to the bad war. This approach applies to armed groups fighting states as well as to states waging wars. In both cases, what is sought is a radical new start leading to the foundation of a reconciled, superior humanity.

State violence, however, may be purely law-conserving, confining its objective to the protection of the stability of a system and the reinforcement of authority. The violence deployed by activists, by contrast, aimed to be foundational, in the sense that it was seen as instrumental for the establishment of a new system and the designation of a new authority. The process of change, one could argue, was inscribed in the agenda of history – as if linear, ineluctable progress was bound to bring radical renovation. The conviction that the advent of a new man was inevitable was accompanied by an indifference to its cost: if what is at stake is the new man, the man of the past may very well turn out to be disposable. The divorce of politics and morality, which runs through political philosophy at least since Hobbes and Machiavelli, is not a specific characteristic of armed organizations, but in their case it is radically intensified by the crucial variable "destiny". Once it is established that change is the natural outcome of evolutionary social processes, creative energy and violence become mere accelerating corollaries of the new settlement destined to follow. Such corollaries are nevertheless decisive; to defeat institutional violence for ever, a final, resolute burst of violence is inevitable. Armed struggle was guided by the search for a final solution, and engaged in what was perceived as the definitive clash leading to a world were clashes would be redundant. Perpetual peace was part of destiny, the absolute, definitive solution following destruction.

According to a well-known anecdote, in Nazi-occupied Paris, a German officer happened to visit Picasso's studio and was shocked when he saw the chaotic violence of Guernica. He asked: "Did you do this?" Picasso calmly replied: "No, you did this." Violent political activists would offer their own version of this anecdote. If asked whether the destruction they caused was the result of their left-wing ideology, they would reply that their violent acts were the result of official politics: "You did this!" In their self-perception, moreover, echoes of a celebrated Surrealist slogan could be heard: theirs was action married with dream. Think of Breton's action-thought, which is a challenge to conventional philosophizing, that is against solitary, inactive contemplation. Surrealism was very influential on sections of social movement throughout the 1960s and 70s, not so much for its theory of aesthetics, as for its declaration of hostility against the bourgeoisie, the enemy incarnate. It inspired political action because, in the 1920s, distancing itself from the "rationality", madness and chauvinism of World War I, Surrealism advocated the revolutionary inner urges and the omnipotence of dreams.

Similar intellectual points of reference put armed groups in a position to draw a comfortable cognitive map; providing them with an ability to locate their action within a meaningful whole. Everything was permitted to them, because they perceived themselves as direct instruments of a divinity, the historical necessity of progress. For other ideological influences, think of Sartre, whose ideas revolved around the notion that freedom has to be gained through evil. Sartre did not refer to the banality of evil, he just acknowledged the necessity of violence. In La putain respecteuse, Lizzie pushes the Black to kill the White who is threatening to lynch him for a crime he has not committed. She cannot resort to violence herself, she cannot afford such a disrespectful act. She is a slave of conventional morality. The Black, constrained by necessity, commits the crime in order to gain his freedom. In Le diable et le bon dieu, violence is the result of the pursuit of the absolute, the definitive, and of the total rejection of the existing world.

Only years later did members of these organizations, at least those who felt the need to speak publicly, develop a "critical cognitive mapping", in a sense shifting their allegiance from Sartre to Simone Weil. Absolute love and desire may be destructive. Limited desire, notes Weil, is in harmony with the world; desire and love that contain the infinite are not.

You come here every day. Come to drink and bet. You talk to one another or you talk to yourself. You scarcely look out of the windows. You look in your wallet to see how to get through the day. You glance at the newspaper. You carry on as usual, waiting. You feel closed in. You flush the toilet. You try to keep up appearances. You doubt yourself. When you leave places you tell yourself: it's for the best. You leave, and behind you at the bar your story goes on. The sun outside dazzles you. You put your hands in your pockets out of the draught of the street-cleaners' machine, blowing away the dead leaves. You cross the square, sprightly. You will come back tomorrow. You take the next corner.

They spoke of the sadness of becoming orphans. One is always a child when one loses one's parents. They said what they felt: there's no one ahead because father and mother had always gone ahead opening the road, on which they now found themselves alone; there's no one behind because father and mother were always behind with their hands on their children's shoulders. Henceforth orphaned, alone with what's behind, alone with what lies ahead, everything will go on without any return to the past. They were thinking about the time of their lives. The departure of their parents so present for them and for others soon to fade away and
be overshadowed by other deaths. They spoke of their fears about what time will efface and will then only remain in them.

They cry out. They cry out with all their colours. At springtime in the trees. In house, garden, fields. They cry out on graves in cemeteries. They cry out everywhere all the time against everything and against time. They cry out for the fruit they will become. They cry out for their petals fallen on the earth beneath the rain. Decay and fecundation. They cry out for their roots delving into the dead weight. They cry out for their stems taut in the light. They cry out between earth and heaven, like stitches closing a wound. They cry out beside men like their young sisters. All their colours cry out.

We are beside ourselves. An elation of some boiling sap gives us the wings of butterflies. We believe we are flying. We do fly, and at the same moment the earth tugs us towards our own decomposition and takes us slowly into her night. Rid of ourselves we become liquid. Humus absorbs us. We become flowers, a few salvoes, a few further waves, a few more times on the face of the earth, before disappearing into the depths of this sweet mess. Restored to silent earth.

Translated by John Berger.