A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

In this flowering of air, this fertility of the heavens, it seemed as if a man’s one duty was to live and be happy.

Every day, his life alternated, from this calm consumptive to Emmanuel bursting into song, from the smell of coffee to the smell of tar, alienated from himself and his interests, so far 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.

The dreary furnishings – some rickety rattan chairs, the wardrobe with its yellowed mirror, a dressing-table missing one corner – did not exist for him: habit had blurred everything. He moved through the ghost of a flat, which required no effort of him. In another room, he would have to grow accustomed to novelty, to struggle once again. He wanted to diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed.

A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.

Mersault saw in her not the future but all the force of his desire focused upon her and satisfied by this appearance, this image. The lips she offered him seemed a message from a world without passion and swollen with desire, where his heart would find satisfaction. And this seemed a miracle to him. His heart pounded with an emotion he almost took for love. And when he felt the ripe and resilient flesh under his mouth, it was as though he bit into a kind of fierce liberty, after caressing her a long time with his own lips.

What astonished him about love-making was – the first time, at least – the terrible intimacy the woman accepted and the fact that she could receive a part of a stranger’s body inside her own. In such intoxication and abandonment, in such surrender he recognized the exalting and sordid power of love.

‘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.’

I know what kind of life I’d have. I wouldn’t make an experiment out of my life: I would be the experiment of my life. Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s living only in so far as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the me for everyone.’

‘What I’m sure of,’ he began, ‘is that you can’t be happy without money. That’s all. 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 snobbery 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 to renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will to happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. 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.

To have money is to have time. That’s my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.’

The craving for happiness seemed to me the noblest thing in man’s heart.

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.’

‘For twenty years I’ve been unable to have the experience of certain happiness. This life which devours me – I won’t have known it to the full, and what frightens me about death is the certainty it will bring me that my life has been consummated without me. I will have lived … marginally – do you understand?’

Today, in the face of abjection and solitude, his heart said: ‘No.’ And in the great distress that washed over him, Mersault realized that his rebellion was the only authentic thing in him, and that everything elsewhere was misery and submission.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about. Mersault thought about his life and exercised his bewildered consciousness and his longing for happiness in a train compartment which was like one of those cells where a man learns to know what he is by what is more than himself.

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.

He had to create his happiness and his justification. And doubtless the task would be easier for him now. 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 understood. How long he had craved a woman’s love! And he was not made for love. All his life – the office on the docks, his room and his nights of sleep there, the restaurant he went to, his mistress – he had pursued singlemindedly a happiness which in his heart he believed was impossible. In this he was no different from everyone else. He had played at wanting to be happy. Never had he sought happiness with a conscious and deliberate desire.

What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it. Now he knew he was not made for such love, but for the innocent and terrible love of the dark god he would henceforth serve.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. Most men cannot even prove they are not mediocre.

Like warm dough being squeezed and kneaded, all he wanted was to hold his life between his hands: the way he felt during those two long nights on the train when he would talk to himself, prepare himself to live. To lick his life like barley-sugar, to shape it, sharpen it, love it at last – that was his whole passion.

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

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 severance.

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

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.

‘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’s 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.’

For the onlookers, there is a bitter sweetness in every departure. ‘They’re lucky,’ Lucienne said. ‘Yes.’ He was thinking ‘No’ – or at least that he didn’t envy them their luck. For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain lustre, 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. He could hear Zagreus: ‘Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.’

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. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.

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 animals of the least or the greatest intelligence. At the point where the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth and with it his extreme glory, his extreme love.

‘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.’

‘A man’s destiny,’ Mersault said without moving, ‘is always passionately interesting, if he achieves it passionately. And for some men, a passionate destiny is always a ready-made destiny.’

At this hour, Mersault’s life seemed so remote to him, he felt so solitary and indifferent to everything and to himself as well, that it seemed to him he had at last attained what he was seeking, that the peace which filled him now was born of that patient self-abandonment he had pursued and achieved with the help of this warm world so willing to deny him without anger.

As he wavered between one suffering and another, between somnolence and anxiety, he suddenly realized he was ill, and anguish overwhelmed him at the thought that he might die in this unconsciousness, without being able to see clearly. The village steeple chimed, but he could not keep count of the strokes. He did not want to die like a sick man. He did not want his illness to be what it is so often, an attenuation, a transition to death. What he really wanted was the encounter between his life – a life filled with blood and health – and death.

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 traveller vainly seeking to slake his thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture which erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion.

For he had played his part, fashioned his role, perfected man’s one duty, which is only to be happy. Not for long, no doubt. He had destroyed the obstacle, and this inner brother he had engendered in himself – what did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.