A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way,

The creases in his trousers had vanished, and with them the warmth and confidence of a world made for ordinary men.

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

And in the great distress that washed over him, Mersault realized that his rebellion was the only authentic thing in him, and that everything else was misery and submission.

But healthy people have a natural skill in avoiding feverish eyes.

He recognized in himself that power to forget which only children have, and geniuses, and the innocent.

“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.

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

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.