The Fall

by Albert Camus

I always thought our fellow citizens were crazy about two things: ideas and fornication. This way and that, as it were. In any case, we shouldn’t judge them badly for it. They’re not the only ones – it’s like that all over Europe. I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They’ll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject.

I live in the Jewish quarter, or what they called the Jewish quarter until our Hitlerite brethren cleared a space in it. What a clean-up! Seventy-five thousand Jews deported or murdered: that’s vacuum cleaning. I admire such diligence, such methodical patience! You have to be methodical when you have no character.

I knew one pure heart that refused mistrust. He was a pacifist, a libertarian, who loved all mankind and all animals equally. Yes, an exceptional soul, there’s no doubt of it. Well, during the last religious wars in Europe he retired to the country. There he wrote over the door of his house: ‘Wherever you come from welcome and enter.’ And who do you suppose answered his invitation? Why, militiamen, who marched in, made themselves at home and disembowelled him.

What? Those ladies behind the windows? Dreams, sir, inexpensive dreams, a voyage to the Indies! They perfume themselves with spices. You go inside, they close the curtains and the ship sets sail. The gods come down on the naked bodies and the islands are cast deliriously adrift, crowned with a tousled mop of palm trees tossed by the wind. Try it, do.

There’s no denying that, at least for the moment, judges are necessary, don’t you agree? And yet I couldn’t understand how a man could appoint himself to exercise that surprising office.

How many crimes have been committed for no other reason than that the perpetrator could not bear being in the wrong!

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! They leave us free, we can take our time, fit the tribute into the interval between cocktails and a nice mistress, in other words, lost moments. If they did oblige us to do anything, it would be to remember, and our memories are short. No, what we like in our friends is fresh death, painful death, our own feelings, in short, ourselves!

That’s what men are like, sir: two-faced: they cannot love unless they love themselves. Watch your neighbours when there happens to be a death in the building. They were sleeping through their little lives and then, for example, the concierge dies. All at once, they’re wide awake, quivering, asking for news, feeling sorry. A death is announced and at last the curtain goes up. They need tragedy; after all, it’s their little moment of transcendence, their aperitif.

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!

Power, on the other hand, settles everything. It’s taken us some time, but we’ve realized this at last. For example, you must have noticed that our old Europe is finally thinking along the right lines. We don’t say any longer, as we used to in more innocent times: ‘There’s what I think. Now what are your objections?’ We’ve reached the age of lucidity: dialogue has been replaced by communiqués. ‘Here’s the truth,’ we say. ‘You can argue over it if you wish, we don’t care, but in a few years the police will come and show you I’m right.’

As though my true desire was not to be the most intelligent and generous creature on earth, but merely to defeat whomsoever I wished, in short to be the strongest – and, moreover, in the most basic way. The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling over society by violence alone.

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

Some people shout: ‘Love me!’ Others: ‘Don’t love me!’ But there is a group, the worst and most miserable, who say: ‘Don’t love me, but be faithful!’

At least for some people, believe me, not taking what you don’t want is the hardest thing in the world.

How do I know that I don’t have any friends? Very simple: I found out on the day when I considered killing myself in order to play a trick on them – to punish them in a way. But to punish whom? Some people would be surprised, but no one would feel punished. I realized that I had no friends. In any case, suppose I had had any: it wouldn’t have got me anywhere. If I might have been able to commit suicide and then see the effect on them, why, yes, it could have been worth it. But earth is dark, dear friend, and wood is thick, and a shroud is opaque.

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. Then, if there was the slightest certainty that one could enjoy the sight of it, it might be worth proving what they do not want to believe and giving them a shock. But you kill yourself, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they believe you: you are not there to witness their astonishment and their contrition (short-lived, anyway), or to take part in your own funeral, as every man dreams of doing. If we are to end, doubt, we must stop existing, purely and simply.

They always think that people commit suicide for a reason. But one can very well commit suicide for two reasons. No, that idea doesn’t enter their heads. So what’s the use of dying voluntarily and sacrificing oneself to the idea that you want to give of yourself? Once you’re dead, they’ll take the opportunity to assign idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. My dear friend, martyrs should choose to be forgotten, mocked or exploited. As for being understood, never.

The aristocracy doesn’t conceive of itself without a certain distance towards itself and its own life. If necessary, one dies, and one breaks rather than bend. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.

I don’t say of avoiding punishment, because punishment without judgement is bearable. Actually, it has a name which ensures our innocence: we call it ‘misfortune’. No, on the contrary, it’s a question of curtailing judgement, of escaping always being judged, without the sentence ever being pronounced.

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. In my case, the injustice was even greater: I was condemned for past happiness. I had long lived under the illusion of universal accord, while in reality criticism, jibes and scorn rained down upon me, and I remained smiling and oblivious. As soon as I became aware of it, lucidity arrived. I received all the wounds at once and lost my strength at a single blow. Then the whole universe began to laugh around me.

Most of all, don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. All they want is for you to sustain them in the good opinion that they have of themselves and provide them with the additional assurance that they take from your promise of sincerity. How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A liking for the truth at all costs is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing can withstand. It’s a vice, sometimes a comfort, or a form of selfishness. So if you find yourself in that situation, don’t hesitate: promise to be truthful and lie as best you can. You will satisfy their deep desire and doubly prove your affection for them.

Why! I appeared hard, yet I have never been able to resist the offer of a drink or a woman! I was considered active and energetic, yet my kingdom was the bed. I proclaimed my loyalty, yet I think that there is not a single person that I loved whom I did not also eventually betray. Of course, my betrayals did not get in the way of my fidelity, I did achieve a considerable amount of work by means of sheer idleness and I never ceased to help my fellow creatures, because of the pleasure that this gave me. But, however much I repeated these evident truths, I got only little consolation from them. Some mornings, I would conduct my trial to the very end and reach the conclusion that what I excelled in above all was contempt. The very people that I most often helped were those I most despised. With courtesy and a deeply felt sense of solidarity, I daily spat in the faces of the blind.

I have never been able to believe, deep inside, that human affairs are serious matters. I had no idea what was serious, only that it was not in everything that I saw, which seemed to me merely an amusing, or tedious game. There really are some efforts and beliefs that I have never understood. I would always look with astonishment, and some suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money or were thrown into despair at the loss of a ‘situation’ or who sacrificed themselves with a great deal of show for the prosperity of their families. I could better understand one of my friends who decided to give up smoking and succeeded through sheer willpower. One morning, he opened the paper, read that the first hydrogen bomb had exploded, learned its admirable effects and went directly to a tobacconist’s.

I measured the years that separated me from my end. I looked out for examples of men of my age who were dead already. And I was tormented by the idea that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I didn’t know. Quite honestly, was it worth going on with what I was doing? But this was not exactly the point. In fact I was pursued by a ridiculous fear: one could not die without having confessed all one’s lies. Not to God or to one of his representatives: I was above that, as you might imagine. No, it was a matter of confessing to mankind, for example, to a friend or to a woman I loved. Otherwise, if there was only a single lie that remained hidden in a life, death would make it absolute.

You see, it is not enough to accuse oneself to relieve oneself of guilt; otherwise, I should be as innocent as a lamb.

For more than thirty years, I had been loving only myself. How could one expect to lose such a habit? I didn’t; I remained hovering on the brink of passion.

You see, at a certain degree of lucid intoxication, lying between two whores, emptied of all desire, hope is no longer a torture: the mind dominates all ages and the pain of living is for ever past.

true debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligation. In it, one possesses only oneself, so it remains the chosen occupation of those who are great lovers of their own persons. It is a jungle, with no future or past, above all with no promises or immediate sanctions. The places where it happens are cut off from the world: you abandon fear, like hope, as you enter. You don’t have to make conversation. What you have come for can be had without words and even, often – it’s true – without money.

You may have noticed that a man who really suffers from jealousy cannot wait to sleep with the woman, despite believing that she has betrayed him. Of course, what he wants is to make sure once again that his precious treasure still belongs to him. He wishes to possess it, as people say. But it’s also because immediately afterwards, he feels less jealous. Actually, physical jealousy is an effect of imagination at the same time as a judgement against oneself. We attribute the same bad thoughts to our rival as we ourselves have had in those circumstances. Fortunately, an excess of pleasure debilitates the imagination as well as the judgement, so pain is eased along with virility, and for the same space of time. For the same reason, adolescents lose their metaphysical anxieties with their first mistress, and some marriages, which are officially sanctioned orgies, at the same time become the dull hearses of daring and invention. Yes, my dear fellow, bourgeois marriage has put slippers on the country and will soon take it to the doors of death.

But too many people are now climbing up on the cross just so that they can be seen from further away, even if in doing so they have to trample a little on the one who has already been there for so long. Too many people have decided to do without generosity in practising charity.

A person who obeys a law is not afraid of judgement: it restores him to a system in which he believes. But the greatest of human torments is to be judged without a law. Yet this is the torment in which we find ourselves. Deprived of their natural restraint, judges, let loose haphazardly, are working double time. So we have to try to go faster than they do, don’t we? The result is a mighty pandemonium. More and more prophets and healers appear, rushing to produce a good law or a faultless organization, before the earth is a desert.

Look, someone I used to know would divide people into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie; those who prefer to lie rather than have nothing to hide; and finally those who like lying and concealing at the same time. I’ll let you choose which category fits me best.

One can sometimes see more clearly in a person who is lying than in one who is telling the truth.

No excuses, ever, for anyone: that’s my principle from the beginning. I deny good intentions, decent mistakes, wrong steps and extenuating circumstances. With me, there is no benediction, no absolutions are handed out. We just do the sums, then: ‘It amounts to so much. You’re a pervert, a sex maniac, a congenital liar, a pederast, an artist, and so on.’ Like that. No frills. So, in philosophy as in politics, I’m in favour of any favour that denies innocence to Man and every practice that treats him as guilty. Dear fellow, in me you see an enlightened supporter of slavery.

Ah, my dear fellow, for anyone who is alone, recognizing neither god nor master, the weight of days is awful. So one must choose a master, God being out of fashion now. Besides, the word no longer has any meaning; it’s not worth the risk of shocking anyone. Why, our moralists, those who are so serious and love their neighbours: when it comes down to it, nothing distinguishes them from being Christian, except that they don’t preach in churches. In your view, what prevents them from converting? Respect, perhaps: the respect of their fellow men, yes, human respect. They don’t want to cause a scandal so they keep their feelings to themselves. One atheist I knew, a novelist, used to pray every evening. It didn’t make any difference: what a hard time he gave God in his books! What a thrashing, as someone whose name I’ve forgotten would say! One militant freethinker to whom I confided this information threw his hands heavenwards – actually, without meaning any harm by it: ‘It’s no news to me,’ this apostle sighed. ‘They’re all like that.’ If we’re to believe him, eighty per cent of our writers, if only they could do so anonymously, would write and hail the name of God. But they sign their names, according to him, because they love themselves, and they hail nothing, because they hate themselves. As they cannot prevent themselves from judging, they make up for it in morality. In short, they get virtuous satanism. Honestly, this is a peculiar age! Can one really be surprised if peop...

In short, you see, the main idea is not to be free any longer, but to repent and obey a greater knave than you are. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy. Not to mention the fact that we must be revenged for having to die alone. Death is solitary while servitude is collective.

I found that while we are waiting for our masters and their canes, we ought, like Copernicus, to invert the argument if we are to triumph. Since one could not condemn others without at the same time judging oneself, one should heap accusations on one’s own head, in order to have the right to judge others. Since every judge eventually becomes a penitent, one had to take the opposite route and be a professional penitent in order to become a judge.

The more I accuse myself, the more I have the right to judge you. Better still: I incite you to judge yourself, which relieves me by that much more.

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.

But don’t worry. It’s too late now, it will always be too late. Thank goodness!