A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

Every day his life alternated between this calm consumptive and Emmanuel bursting into song, between the smell of coffee and the smell of tar, alienated from himself and his interests, from his heart, his truth. Things that in other circumstances would have excited him left him unmoved now, for they were simply part of his life, until the moment he was back in his room using all his strength and care to smother the flame of life that burned within him.

He exaggerated his ceremonious manner, stepped back to let the usher pass, lowered Marthe’s seat for her. And he did all this less from conceit, from ostentation, than because of the gratitude that made his heart suddenly swell, filling with love for all these people around him. If he gave the usher too big a tip, it was because he did not know how else to pay for his joy, and because he worshipped, by making this everyday gesture, a divinity whose brilliant smile glistened like oil in his gaze.

“People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.”

“You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind.

“Even now, if I had the time … I would only have to let myself go. Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone. The stone cools off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve always thought that’s exactly what happiness would be.”

We don’t have time to be ourselves. We only have time to be happy.

I don’t like superficiality and I don’t like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I’ve noticed is that there’s a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain ‘superior beings’ who think that money isn’t necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It’s enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life’s accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth.

At the strange peace that filled him as he watched the evening suddenly freshening upon the sea, the first star slowly hardening in the sky where the light died out green to be reborn yellow, he realized that after this great tumult and this fury, what was dark and wrong within him was gone now, yielding to the clear water, transparent now, of a soul restored to kindness, to resolution.

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if it was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

The sea wrinkled slowly against the ship’s sides. The sky filled with stars. And Mersault, in silence, felt in himself extreme and violent powers to love, to marvel at this life with its countenance of sunlight and tears, this life in its salt and hot stone—it seemed that by caressing this life, all his powers of love and despair would unite. That was his poverty, that was his sole wealth. As if by writing zero, he was starting over but with a consciousness of his powers and a lucid intoxication which urged him on in the face of his fate.

Innocent, overwhelmed by joy, he understood at last that he was made for happiness.

And each of them, plunging into the depths of the sky, found that extreme point where everything coincides, the secret and tender meditation which makes up the solitude of one’s life.

Facing everything noble and elementary in the world, she united her life with her longing for life, identified her hopes with the movement of the stars. Suddenly turning around, she said to Patrice: “On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.”

Patrice, Catherine, Rose, and Claire then grew aware of the happiness born of their abandonment to the world. If this night was in some sense the figure of their fate, they marveled that it should be at once so carnal and so secret, that upon its countenance mingled both tears and the sun. And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.

Rounding one curve after the next, Mersault steeped himself in this humiliating yet priceless truth: the conditions of the singular happiness he sought were getting up early every morning, taking a regular swim—a conscious hygiene. He drove very fast, resolved to take advantage of his discovery in order to establish himself in a routine which would henceforth require no further effort, to harmonize his own breathing with the deepest rhythm of time, of life itself.

What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses.

Fate is not in man but around him.

And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence—they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveler vainly seeking to slake his thirst.

what did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.