A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

I’d accept even worse – blind, dumb, anything, as long as I feel in my belly that dark fire that is me, me alive. The only thing that would occur to me would be to thank life for letting me burn on.’

Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity – happiness was human, eternity ordinary. 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.

Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched – just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance – so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness.

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 doubtless 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.

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 traveller vainly seeking to slake his thirst.

But for the others, it was the fatal and tender

Happiness was the fact that he had existed.