A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

making them laugh until they were breathless, dizzied by the jolting movement, the searing sky, their own boiling blood.

when the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.

He moved through the ghost of an apartment that required no effort of him.

He wanted to diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed. For this purpose, the old room served him well.

The afternoon diversions had begun. The neighborhood belonged to cats and shopkeepers. The sky, though clear, was lusterless over the ficus trees lining the road.

The streetlamps made the damp sidewalks gleam, and at regular intervals the streetcars would throw reflections on shiny hair, wet lips, a smile, or a silver bracelet.

She went in ahead of him, drawing glances of admiration, her flower-like face smiling, her beauty violent.

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.”

“Yes, I don’t know what to do,” and after a pause straightened up, walked to the window, and added as he stared outside: “I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L’lllustration. Something desperate, you know.”

“With eight hours a day at the office. Oh, it would be different if I was free!”

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Like that sky. It’s rain and sun both, noon and midnight. You know, Zagreus, I think of the lips I’ve kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I’m all those things at once. I’m sure there are times when you wouldn’t even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness

“Each time I think of that flood of pain and joy in myself, I know—I can’t tell you how deeply I know that the game I’m playing is the most serious and exciting one of all.”

Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time.

he knew his imagination was vivid enough to show him the full horror of what life’s negation meant for him, and he drowned in his somnolence all his craving to live, to go on burning in dignity and silence.

he would lick the gun barrel, sticking his tongue into it and sucking out an impossible happiness.

But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.”

But tears gave way to the world without tenderness in which he was immersed.

Every day he thought of leaving and every day, sinking a little deeper into desolation, his longing for happiness had a little less hold over him.

An intense and secret fervor swelled within him, and it was a nostalgia for cities filled with sunlight and women, with the green evenings that close all wounds. Tears burst from his eyes. Inside him widened a great lake of solitude and silence above which ran the sad song of his deliverance.

As other men need to be alone before making their crucial decisions, Mersault, poisoned by solitude and alienation, needed to withdraw into friendship and confidence, to enjoy an apparent security before choosing his life.

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.

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.

From the starry night and the city that was like a spilled sky, swollen with human lights under the warm, deep breeze that rose from the harbor, he drew the thirst of this warm spring, the limitless longing to seize from these vibrant lips all the meaning of that inhuman and dormant world, like a silence enclosed in her mouth.

In the silence, the night recovered its density, its flesh. Filled with twinkling stars, it left in their eyes the play of lights that tears can bring. 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.

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.

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.

It is as if the suddenly cooler dew of the night were rinsing the signs of solitude from them, delivering them from themselves, and by that tremulous and fugitive baptism restoring them to the world.

But now he realized that he had no one to meet tonight, nor tomorrow, nor ever, and that he was facing his longed-for solitude at last. From the moment he no longer had to see anyone, the next day seemed terribly imminent. Yet he convinced himself that this was what he had wanted: nothing before him but himself for a long time—until the end.

he was disconcerted by the variance between the gesture which had brought him to this life and this life itself.

“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.” After a pause, he added: “I don’t know if you understand what I mean.”

He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been.

Those wasted days he had been ashamed of seemed dangerous but necessary now.

He had nothing to do, and his time stretched out, measureless, before him. Each minute recovered its miraculous value, but he did not yet recognize it for what it was. Just as the days of a journey seem interminable whereas in an office the trajectory from Monday occurs in a flash, so Mersault, stripped of all his props, still tried to locate them in a life which had nothing but itself to consider. Sometimes he picked up his watch and stared as the minute hand shifted from one number to the next, marveling that five minutes should seem so interminable. Doubtless that watch opened the way—a painful and tormenting way—which leads to the supreme art of doing nothing.

Day after day, Mersault let himself sink into his life as if he were sliding into water. And just as the swimmer advances by the complicity of his arms and the water which bears him up, helps him on, it was enough to make a few essential gestures—to rest one hand on a tree-trunk, to take a run on the beach—in order to keep himself intact and conscious. Thus he became one with a life in its pure state, he rediscovered a paradise given only to the most private or the most intelligent animals. At the point where the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth and with it his extreme glory, his extreme love.

What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness.

“What matters to me is a certain quality of happiness. I can only find it in a certain struggle with its opposite—a stubborn and violent struggle. Am I happy? Catherine! You know the famous formula—‘If I had my life to live over again’—well, I would live it over again just the way it has been.

“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.”

Only today did his solitude become real, for only today did he feel bound to it. And to have accepted that solitude, to know that henceforth he was the master of all his days to come, filled him with the melancholy that is attached to all greatness.

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,

But before, losing consciousness, he had time to see the night turn pale behind the curtains and to hear, with the dawn and the world’s awakening, a kind of tremendous chord of tenderness and hope which without doubt dissolved his fear of death, though at the same time it assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been his whole reason for living.

Of all the men he had carried inside himself, as every man does at the beginning of this life, of all those various rootless, mingling beings, he had created his life with consciousness, with courage. That was his whole happiness in living and dying. He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. 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. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture that erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion.

what did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? 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. The sea was covered with this golden juice, a sheet of oil upon the water, and gave back to the sun-crushed earth a warm, softening breath which released odors of wormwood, rosemary, and hot stone.