IN LATIN, THE WORD LUXURIA connotes vicious indulgence. The OED defines luxury as something that is desirable but not indispensable. Dr Johnson, in his usual blunt way, calls luxury in plants, “exuberance”, and in people, “addiction to pleasure”.

“Luxury feels static,” Melvyn Kirtley, managing director of Tiffany, says. “It’s been overdemocratised,” Chanel claims.

The word seems beyond rescue, but the concept is being redefined to keep rich people feeling exclusive and to induce envy and desire elsewhere. The Wonder Room at Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street will try to bring to consumerism what used to be an entirely private experience. Snowfall, babies, poems, for instance, prompt wonderment in me but, apparently, I can now buy the experience.

If the Wonder Room has nothing quite wonderful enough, I can nip across the park to Harrods and purchase some gold and diamond cookware from their new Timeless Luxury promotion.

Last night, I ate five different vegetables grown and picked in my own garden. I had time to grow them, time to cook them and time to eat them, which seems pretty luxurious to me. How many gilded cookware consumers will have had the deep pleasure that I experienced, a pleasure compounded by the fact that even if I were as rich as Bill Gates, I could not have eaten fresher food, or got more happiness from what I set on my table?

And after supper I sat on the back step and read Camus until it was dark. I was rereading The Myth of Sisyphus, astonished that it is 65 years since it was published in France.

Camus finds himself confronting the absurdity of life, and as he cannot turn either to God or to social progress for meaning, he concludes that our encounter with the absurd, with meaninglessness, must lead either to suicide or to recovery. The power of the message is that it points towards recovery.

Now I have to imagine Camus walking in to the Wonder Room at Selfridges. Could he have envisaged a world where the answer to existential emptiness is a resin handbag with a gold-plated pacemaker inside?

While poor Camus is having a heart-attack, I won’t pretend that I don’t like a bit of luxury myself, and I know that what one person calls luxurious, another finds tasteless or wasteful. I won’t be paying $4,000 (£1,972) for a pair of Damien Hirst-designed Levis, but I would spend that money on a painting or a first edition, believing that such a purchase is about authenticity and personal passion, not manipulated consumerism. Am I right or am I being self-deceiving?

I think I am right for the same reason that I grow vegetables and read poetry; I want the real thing, and I want to find it within the pattern of a personal philosophy. The Myth of Sisyphus is about making meaning, unity and purpose in a world that cannot provide any of those things, except as an illusion. I do not agree with Camus on everything, and that doesn’t matter a bit. The question is how to live in an absurd world; shopping is not an answer.

Dana Thomas’s new book – Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre, should be read side by side with David Bosshart’s Cheap: The Real Cost of Living in a Low Price, Low Wage World. As Bosshart explains, the world is now divided into small premium segments, where you pay a lot for little, and expanding discount segments where you pay less and less for more and more – like food and clothes. As the basics get cheaper, there is more to spend on the frills, and so, as more people move in to “luxury”, the definition of luxury has to change because it is no longer sufficiently exclusive.

Of course, cheap means that someone somewhere is paying a very high price for the discounts we demand; sweatshop labour, disgusting food practices, and planet collapse are part of the bigger picture of our crazy economics. Camus died in a car accident before aggressive marketing became the dominant driver of capitalism, but his call to break the link between passivity and survival is as relevant as ever. For him, to get through life by refusing action or the consequences of action, was to be as good as dead. To become conscious and to make connections is hugely painful, and inevitably, the question – suicide or recovery – is not academic.

I, too, am on the side of recovery, and in the only way I know, which is to seek out what has real worth and to try, however hopelessly, to be worth something myself.

Deluxe by Dana Thomas, Allen Lane, £20, Buy the book for £18 (inc p&p)

Cheap? by David Bosshart, Kogan Page, £9.99, Buy for £9.49 (inc p&p)

Jeanette Winterson appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 13 at 6pm 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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