A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

Millions of tiny white smiles thronged down from the blue sky. They played over the leaves still cupping the rain, over the damp earth of the paths, soared to the blood-red tile roofs, then back into the lakes of air and light from which they had just overflowed. A tiny plane hummed its way across the sky. 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.

In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it: 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.

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

‘You look tired,’ he said. From reserve, Mersault merely answered: ‘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 else subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know.’

‘You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re judging yourself now, Mersault, and you don’t like the sentence. You live badly. Like a barbarian.’

‘Listen,’ Zagreus resumed, ‘and look at me. I have someone to help me, to set me on the toilet, and afterwards to wash me and dry me. Worse, I pay someone for it. Yet I’ll never make a move to cut short a life I believe in so much … 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.’

‘And you, Mersault, with a body like yours, your one duty is to live and be happy.’ ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Mersault said. ‘With eight hours a day at the office. Oh, it would be different if I was free!’

‘A few years ago I had everything before me – people talked to me about my life, about my future. And I said yes. I even did the things you had to do to have such things. But even back then, it was all alien to me. To devote myself to impersonality – that’s what concerned me. Not to be happy, not to be “against”. I can’t explain it, but you know what I mean.’

‘Even now, if I had the time … I would only have to let myself go. Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone. The stone cools off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve always thought that’s exactly what happiness would be.’

‘I’m sorry, Zagreus, but it’s been a long time since I talked about certain things. So I don’t know any more – or I’m not sure. When I look at my life and its secret colours, 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 – I can’t say it.’

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.’

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.

‘Oh, I know perfectly well that most rich men have no sense of happiness. But that’s not the question. 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.’

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.’

Now, as whenever he found himself confronting a brutal manifestation of life, Mersault was powerless, filled with respect for that animal pain.

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

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.

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 again, but with a consciousness of his powers and a lucid intoxication which urged him on in the face of his fate.

Filled with twinkling stars, it left in their eyes the same play of light 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 constitutes the solitude of one’s life.

Claire stood up, put her hands on the parapet and held her face up to the sky. Facing everything noble and elementary in the world, she united her life with her longing for life, identified her hopes with the movement of the stars. Suddenly turning around, she said to Patrice: ‘On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.’

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.

‘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.’

‘Hey, Mersault,’ Celeste told him, ‘you haven’t changed. Still the same!’ ‘Yes,’ Mersault said. He marvelled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so aware of 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. Just as dogs don’t change character, men are dogs for each other.

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.

‘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.’

Still, even so, you seem to love life more than I do.’ He turned around. ‘Because for me, loving life is not going for a swim. It’s living in intoxication, intensity. Women, adventures, other countries … It’s action, making something happen. A burning, marvellous life. What I mean is – I want you to understand me –’ He seemed ashamed of his excitement, ‘I love life too much to be satisfied with nature.’

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 exaltation which weaves together the hopes and despairs of human life. Conscious yet alien, 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.

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.

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.