The Stranger

by Albert Camus

As Richard Howard pointed out in his classic statement on retranslation in his prefatory note to The Immoralist, time reveals all translation to be paraphrase. All translations date; certain works do not.

For a second I had the ridiculous feeling that they were there to judge me.

this is exactly how i felt during my dad's wake

This has been going on for eight years.

no :( the dog deserves so much better

I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition,

I couldn’t see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn’t unhappy.

“I hope the dogs don’t bark tonight. I always think it’s mine.”

my heart just shattered into pieces

I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy.

Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but just in time, I remembered that I had killed a man.

He asked if I had felt any sadness that day. The question caught me by surprise and it seemed to me that I would have been very embarrassed if I’d had to ask it.

I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself and that it was hard for me to tell him what he wanted to know.

I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything. At one time or another all normal people have wis...

explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.

He didn’t understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

“It’s just that I don’t have much to say. So I keep quiet.”

But I was tired of repeating the same story over and over. It seemed as if I had never talked so much in my life.

He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless.

sounds like a YOU problem

As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I’m not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed.

Everything was so natural, so well handled, and so calmly acted out that I had the ridiculous impression of being “one of the family.”

When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man.

the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten.

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.

Anyway, I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he got and that you should never play games.

I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow” still had any meaning for me.

for the first time in years I had this stupid urge to cry, because I could feel how much all these people hated me.

And they will conclude that a stranger may offer a cup of coffee, but that beside the body of the one who brought him into the world, a son should have refused it.”

??? what does the coffee have to do with anything

“Gentlemen of the jury, the day after his mother’s death, this man was out swimming, starting up a dubious liaison, and going to the movies, a comedy, for laughs. I have nothing further to say.”

who are we to dictate how a man mourns? if he should mourn at all?

“You must understand,” Salamano kept saying, “you must understand.”

tears in my eyes

they seemed to be arguing the case as if it had nothing to do with me. Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion.

I was listening, and I could hear that I was being judged intelligent. But I couldn’t quite understand how an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.

I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything. My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow.

I didn’t have the right to show any feeling or goodwill.

the prosecutor started talking about my soul. He said that he had peered into it and that he had found nothing, gentlemen of the jury. He said the truth was that I didn’t have a soul and that nothing human, not one of the moral principles that govern men’s hearts, was within my reach.

what the fuck???

“I am convinced, gentlemen,” he added, raising his voice, “that you will not think it too bold of me if I suggest to you that the man who is seated in the dock is also guilty of the murder to be tried in this court tomorrow. He must be punished accordingly.”

this man is fucking crazy

The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing there seized me by the throat, and all I wanted was to get it over with

I might have discovered that in at least one instance the wheel had stopped, that in spite of all the unrelenting calculation, chance and luck had, at least once, changed something. Just once! In a way, I think that would have been enough. My heart would have taken over from there.

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn’t speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was.

You always get exaggerated notions of things you don’t know anything about.

I would make another effort to divert my thoughts. I would listen to my heartbeat. I couldn’t imagine that this sound which had been with me for so long could ever stop. I’ve never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.

I’ve never liked being surprised. If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.

But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for thousands of years.

At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway.

Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.

How was I to know, since apart from our two bodies, now separated, there wasn’t anything to keep us together or even to remind us of each other?

Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. I wasn’t interested in her dead. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me.

“Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?”

“No, I refuse to believe you! I know that at one time or another you’ve wished for another life.” I said of course I had, but it didn’t mean any more than wishing to be rich, to be able to swim faster, or to have a more nicely shaped mouth.

he stopped me and wanted to know how I pictured this other life. Then I shouted at him, “One where I could remember this life!” and that’s when I told him I’d had enough.

But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so?

Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.