As long as he could squelch these murmurings that it could be otherwise, as long as he could convince himself that this, indeed, was all he wanted, then this stranger could make a home out of exile: “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.”4 Such resignation—the consolation of alienation—is the deep bass note in Camus’s corpus that makes his work resonate as contemporary. If
