The Fall

by Albert Camus

But you kill yourself and what does it matter whether or not they believe you? You are not there to see their amazement and their contrition (fleeting at best), to witness, according to every man’s dream, your own funeral. In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.

You think you are dying to punish your wife and actually you are freeing her. It’s better not to see that.

They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it’s quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them.

Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood—never!

for punishment without judgment is bearable.

edified.

My friends hadn’t changed. On occasion, they still extolled the harmony and security they found in my company. But I was aware only of the dissonances and disorder that filled me; I felt vulnerable and open to public accusation.

It was harder and more painful, on the other hand, to admit that I had enemies among people I hardly knew or didn’t know at all. I had always thought, with the ingenuousness I have already illustrated to you, that those who didn’t know me couldn’t resist liking me if they came to know me.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.

moment he will choose to weep. Yet there is no credit in being honest or intelligent by birth. Just as one is surely no more responsible for being a criminal by nature than for being a criminal by circumstance.

Wealth, cher ami, is not quite acquittal, but reprieve, and that’s always worth taking.

How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It’s a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.

rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society.

What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

I have never been really able to believe that human affairs were serious matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me—which

I was absent at the moment when I took up the most space.

Even now, the Sunday matches in an overflowing stadium, and the theater, which I loved with the greatest passion, are the only places in the world where I feel innocent.

I lived my whole life under a double code, and my most serious acts were often the ones in which I was the least involved.

Then it was that the thought of death burst into my daily life. I would measure the years separating me from my end.

I would look for examples of men of my age who were already dead. And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I had no idea. Frankly, was what I was doing worth continuing? But that was not quite it.

That absolute murder of a truth used to make me dizzy.

What did one man’s lie matter in the history of generations? And what pretension to want to drag out into the full light of truth a paltry fraud, lost in the sea of ages like a grain of sand in the ocean!

death was faithful at my bedside; I used to get up with it every morning, and compliments became more and more unbearable to me. It seemed to me that the falsehood increased with them so inordinately that never again could I put myself right.

I had this feeling at 14. I was also diagnosed with depression.

working, to slap infants in the subway. I dreamed of all that and did none of it, or if I did something of the sort, I have forgotten it. In any case, the very word “justice” gave me strange fits of rage.

I didn’t want their esteem because it wasn’t general, and how could it be general, since I couldn’t share it?

ridicule. I had to liberate at all cost the feeling that was stifling me. In order to reveal to all eyes what he was made of, I wanted to break open the handsome wax-figure I presented everywhere.

first. On the contrary, I meant to defend the thief by exposing the crimes of the honest man, the lawyer in this instance.

duped? I am free, shielded from your severities, yet who am I? A Louis XIV in pride, a billy goat for lust, a Pharaoh for wrath, a king of laziness. I haven’t killed anyone? Not yet, to be sure! But have I not let deserving creatures die?

it is not enough to accuse yourself in order to clear yourself; otherwise, I’d be as innocent as a lamb.

dawdling,

Hold on, I, too, am drifting; I am becoming lyrical! Stop me, cher, I beg you.

do you know Greece? No? So much the better. What should we do there, I ask you? There one has to be pure in heart. Do you know that there male friends walk along the street in pairs holding hands?

But tell me, would you take my hand in the streets of Paris? Oh, I’m joking. We have a sense of decorum; scum makes us stilted.

Oh I like him T^T

Before appearing in the Greek islands, we should have to wash at length. There the air is chaste and sensual enjoyment as transparent as the sea. And we …

Hey...hey! >:(

I made up my mind to leave the society of men. No, no, I didn’t look for a desert island; there are no more. I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don’t really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman’s bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise? In distress, I hastened to my natural harbor.

Inasmuch as I needed to love and be loved, I thought I was in love. In other words, I acted the fool.

I often caught myself asking a question which, as a man of experience, I had always previously avoided. I would hear myself asking: “Do you love me?” You know that it is customary to answer in such cases: “And you?” If I answered yes, I found myself committed beyond my real feelings. If I dared to say no, I ran the risk of ceasing to be loved, and I would suffer therefor.

I conceived such a loathing for love that for years I could not hear “La Vie en rose”

Without desire, women bored me beyond all expectation, and obviously I bored them too. No more gambling and no more theater—I was probably in the realm of truth. But truth, cher ami, is a colossal bore.

true debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself;

It is a jungle without past or future, without any promise above all, nor any immediate penalty.

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

You must have noticed that men who really suffer from jealousy have no more urgent desire than to go to bed with the woman they nevertheless think has betrayed them.

immediately afterward they are less jealous. Physical jealousy is a result of the imagination at the same time that it is a self-judgment.

He spoke softly to the adulteress: “Neither do I condemn thee!” but that doesn’t matter; they condemn without absolving anyone. In the name of the Lord, here is what you deserve. Lord? He, my friend, didn’t expect so much. He simply wanted to be loved, nothing more.

But what do I care? Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning?

Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds.

At one time, my house was full of half-read books. That’s just as disgusting as those people who cut a piece off a foie gras and have the rest thrown out.

I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.