A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

“You see, Mersault, all the misery and cruelty of our civilization can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.”

Don’t think I’m saying that money makes happiness. I only mean that for a certain class of beings happiness is possible, provided they have time, and that having money is a way of being free of money.”

It was through this odor that he saw the museums and discovered the mystery and the profusion of baroque genius which filled Prague with its gold magnificence. The altars, which glowed softly in the darkness, seemed borrowed from the coppery sky, the misty sunlight so frequent over the city. The glistening scrolls and spirals, the elaborate setting that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its resemblance to the crèches made for children at Christmas, the grandiose and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of infantile, feverish, and overblown romanticism by which men protect themselves against their own demons.

Some evenings, always at the same times, he crossed the Charles Bridge and strolled through the Hradčany district above the river, a deserted and silent neighborhood, though only a few steps from the busiest streets in the city. He wandered among these huge palaces, across enormous paved courtyards, past ironwork gates, around the cathedral.

only his lucidity, his anxiety awake.

Mersault groped for the word, the sentence that would formulate the hope in his heart, that would resolve his anxiety. In his weakened state, he needed formulas. The night and then the day passed in this obstinate struggle with the word, the image which from now on would constitute the whole tonality of his mind, the sympathetic or miserable dream of his future.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

He had to create his happiness and his justification.

He had played at wanting to be happy. Never had he sought happiness with a conscious and deliberate desire.

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.

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.

Everyone had his joy to conquer, every day.

Man diminishes man’s powers. The world leaves them intact.

“We may be chic, but we’re simple too,”

Gula has jumped into her lap, and by slowly caressing the cat’s skull and back, Rose anticipates that secret marriage in which the squinting cat and the motionless woman will see the same universe out of the same half-closed eyes.

With her blond hair pulled back, her small straight nose, and the splendid thrust of her breasts, she represented and even sanctioned a kind of secret agreement which linked her to the earth and organized the world around her movements.

The world says only one thing, it wakens, then it wearies. But there always comes a time when it vanquishes by mere repetition and gains the reward of its own perseverance.

The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.

And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.

At this moment, when the night overflows with stars, their gestures are fixed against the great mute face of the sky. Patrice raises an arm toward the night, sweeping sheaves of stars in his gesture, the sea of the heavens stirred by his arm and all Algiers at his feet, around them like a dark, glittering cape of jewels and shells.

Several weeks later he was back, convinced that travel now meant an alien way of life to him: wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.

The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with a countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.

“There’s the risk of being loved, little Catherine, and that would keep me from being happy.”

“Never give up, Catherine. You have so much inside you, and the noblest sense of happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.”

“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory … Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That’s why it’s good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion—it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

For the onlookers, there is a bitter sweetness in every departure.

For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.

so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.

At the point where the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth and with it his extreme glory, his extreme love.

Mersault declared he would have made a splendid Roman emperor during the decline.

“You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. 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. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.”

“No one is happy relatively—for a longer or shorter time. You’re happy or you’re not. That’s all. And death has nothing to do with it—death is an accident of happiness, in that case.”

Nothing is uglier or more degrading than sickness.”

Before, I wanted to be happy, to do what had to be done, to settle down somewhere I really wanted to be, for instance. But sentimental anticipation is always wrong. We have to live the way it’s easiest for us to live—not forcing ourselves. I suppose it sounds a little cynical, but it’s also the point of view you have to take to survive.

“Actually, you’re an idealist.” And he had the sense that everything was enclosed in that moment which shifts from birth to death, that everything was judged and consecrated then.

“That’s because, you see,” Bernard said with a kind of sadness, “the opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.”

“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.”

He had managed to dispel the bitterness which besets any decent soul aware of the vile iniquities of the birth and growth of a splendid fate. This sordid and revolting curse, whereby the poor end in poverty the life they have begun in poverty, he had rejected by using money as a weapon, opposing hatred with hatred. And out of this beast-to-beast combat, the angel sometimes emerged, intact, wings and halo and all, in the warm breath of the sea.

At the summer’s end, the carobs drench all Algeria with the smell of love, and in the evening or after the rain, it is as if the entire earth were resting, after giving itself to the sun, its womb drenched with a sperm smelling of bitter almonds. All day, their odor had poured down from the huge trees, heavy and oppressive.

Motionless now, Mersault felt how close happiness is to tears, caught up in that silent exultation which weaves together the hopes and despairs of human life. Conscious yet alienated, devoured by passion yet disinterested, Mersault realized that his life and his fate were completed here and that henceforth all his efforts would be to submit to this happiness and to confront its terrible truth.

Lucidity too was a long patience. Everything could be won, earned, acquired. He struck his fist on the arm of the chair. A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive. He becomes strong, he becomes lucid. Fate is not in man but around him.

Of that great ravaging energy which had borne him on, of that fugitive and generating poetry of life, nothing was left now but the transparent truth which is the opposite of poetry.

They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.

Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

At noon the wind dropped, the day split open like ripe fruit and trickled down the face of the world, a warm and choking juice in a sudden concert of cicadas.