The Fall

by Albert Camus

Holland is a reverie, sir, a dream of gold and smoke, more smoky by day and golden at night, while night and day this reverie is filled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily going past on their black bicycles with high handlebars, funerary swans endlessly drifting past, throughout the country, around the sea, along the canals. They are dreaming, their heads in their copper clouds, they ride around, they pray, like sleepwalkers in the gilded incense of the mist, and they are no longer here. They have departed, to travel thousands of kilometres away, to Java, the distant isle. They pray to those grimacing gods of Indonesia which they have set up in all their windows and which, at this moment, are drifting around above our heads before alighting, like resplendent monkeys, on the shop signs and stepped roofs, to remind these nostalgic colonials that Holland is not only the Europe of the counting-house, but the sea, the sea that leads to Cipango and those islands where men die happy and insane.

I have always mocked the greed which, in our society, takes the place of ambition.

I could understand the man who, after taking holy orders, renounced his vows because his cell, instead of opening as he had expected on a wide landscape, faced a blank wall.

After all, living above the rest is still the only way to be seen and saluted by the greatest number.

No, the more I was blessed, the more I felt – though I hesitate to admit this – chosen, personally chosen, above all others, for this long, enduring success. In reality, this was a result of my modesty. I refused to attribute my success to sole personal merit and I could not believe that the combination of such different and such extreme qualities in a single being was the result of pure chance. This is why I lived happily and felt, in some way, entitled to this happiness by a command from on high.

There were times when I danced for nights on end, more and more intoxicated with people and life. Sometimes, late in those nights of dancing, slightly tipsy, my frenzy and the mad abandonment of those around me drove me into a rapture that was at once weary and satiated, so that it appeared to me, in the extreme of fatigue, that I finally understood the secret of life and the world. But by the following morning the weariness had vanished and with it the secret; so I was off again …

Have you observed that only death awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just departed – don’t you find? How we admire those of our masters who have been silenced, their mouths full of dirt! Then our tributes come naturally, tributes that they may have waited all their lives to hear. But do you know why we are always fairer and more generous towards the dead? The reason is simple! We have no obligation where they’re concerned!

There was one man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatter-brained woman, sacrificing everything in his life for her – friends, work, even respectability – only to acknowledge one evening that he had never loved her. He was bored, that’s all, bored, like most people; so he created from scratch a life of complications and drama for himself. Something’s got to happen – that’s the explanation for most human undertakings. Something’s got to happen, even if it’s slavery without love, or war, or death. So long live funerals!

Life got harder for me: when the body is sad, the heart languishes.

When it came to modesty, I was unbeatable.

One day, when I was driving my car and hesitated a moment before driving off at a green light, while our patient fellow citizens instantly started to sound their horns behind me, I suddenly recalled another episode that had taken place in similar circumstances.

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling over society by violence alone.

It matters little, wouldn’t you say, to abase one’s mind if by that means one succeeds in dominating everyone. I found that there were sweet dreams of oppression within me.

You know what charm is: a way of obtaining the answer ‘yes’ without having asked a clear question.

So, by my own admission, I could not live unless all creatures throughout the world, or the greatest possible number, were turned towards me, eternally vacant, deprived of independent life, ready to respond to my call at any moment, in short, condemned to sterility until the day when I might deign to shine my light upon them. In short, for me to live happily, all the creatures whom I chose had not to live at all. They were only to receive life, from time to time, at my good pleasure.

Men are not convinced of your arguments, your sincerity or the seriousness of your suffering, except by your death. As long as you are alive, your case is debatable and you only deserve their scepticism.

My dear friend, martyrs should choose to be forgotten, mocked or exploited. As for being understood, never.

You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people – which means that there is no way out. Happy and judged or absolved and miserable.

Since this is hard to do, a difficult business of getting people at once to admire and excuse your nature, they all try to be rich. Why? Is that what you were wondering? For the power, of course. But above all because wealth shields from immediate judgement, lifts you out of the crowd in the underground, shuts you up in a chromium-plated car and isolates you in huge expanses of protected parkland, or sleeping-cars and luxury cabins. Wealth, my dear friend, is not actually acquittal, but a reprieve – always worth having …

I have never been able to believe, deep inside, that human affairs are serious matters.

Yes, in this world one can make war, play at love, torture one’s fellow man, show off in the newspapers or merely speak ill of one’s neighbour while knitting. But in some cases carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.

Ah, my dear fellow, for anyone who is alone, recognizing neither god nor master, the weight of days is awful.

After all, when it comes down to it, I was wrong to tell you that the main thing was to avoid judgement. The main thing is to be able to let oneself do anything, while from time to time loudly declaring one’s own unworthiness. I allow myself everything, once again, and this time without laughing. I haven’t changed my way of life: I still love myself and I still use other people. It’s just that confessing my sins permits me to start again with a lighter heart and to gratify myself twice, firstly enjoying my nature, and then a delicious repentance.