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.
He wanted to diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed.
To know your body’s limits--that’s the true psychology. But it doesn’t matter anyway. We don’t have time to be ourselves. We only have time to be happy.
. . .a man learns to know what he is by what is more than himself.
Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his fist pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. 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 for 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. Never until the day . . . And from that moment on, because of a single act calculated in utter lucidity, his life had changed and happiness seemed possible. Doubtless he had given birth to this new being in suffering--but what was suffering compared to the degrading farce he had performed till now? He saw, for instance, that what had attracted him to Marthe was vanity, not love. Even that miracle of the lips she offered him was nothing more than the delighted astonishment of a power acknowledged and awakened by conquest. The meaning of his affair with Marthe consisted of the replacement of that initial astonishment by a certainty, the triumph of vanity over modesty. What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men’s eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. 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.
He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if it was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. Most men cannot even prove they are not mediocre. He had won that right. But the proof remained to be shown, the risk to be run. Only one thing had changed. He felt free of his past, and of what he had lost. He wanted nothing now but this contraction and this enclosure inside himself, this lucid and patient fervor in the face of the world. As with warm dough that’s 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. This presence of himself to himself--henceforth his effort would be to maintain it in the face of everything in his life, even at the cost of a solitude he knew now was so difficult to endure. He would not submit. All his violence would help him now, and at the point to which it raised him, his love would join him, like a furious passion to live.
The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death. [They] 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 marveled 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 learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.
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.
. . .the risk of being loved . . .would keep me from being happy.
"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 a 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." After a pause, he added: "I don’t know if you understand what I mean."
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to 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 one another.
Surprised, Mersault stared at her. He suddenly realized that Marthe had always been very decent with him. She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. 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. Today he understood that Marthe had been genuine with him--that she had been what she was, and that he owed to her a good deal. It was beginning to rain--just enough to reflect the lights of the street; through the shining drops he saw Marthe’s suddenly serious face and felt overcome by a burst of gratitude he could not express--in the old days he might have taken it for a kind of love. But he could only find stiff words. . .
For the onlookers, there is a bitter sweetness in every departure.
. . .starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, 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 would hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness."
Although I know how to keep my distance, I seize any and every opportunity.
I am well aware that an addiction to silk underwear does not necessarily imply that one’s feet are dirty.
A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
You have heard, of course, of those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil that attack the unwary swimmer by thousands and with swift little nibbles clean him up in a few minutes, leaving only an immaculate skeleton? Well, that’s what their organization is. "Do you want a good clean life? Like everybody else?" You say yes, of course. How can one say no? "O. K. You’ll be cleaned up. Here’s a job, a family, and organized leisure activities." And the little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone. But I am unjust. I shouldn’t say their organization. It is ours, after all: it’s merely a question of which will clean up the other.
In all things we are merely "in a way."
You recognize it to begin with and then because you feel superior to it.
The camel that provided the hair for my overcoat was probably mangy; yet my nails are manicured.
When one has no character one has to apply a method.
Even when the attraction is strongest, I am on my guard.
You go in, they draw the curtains, and the navigation begins. The gods come down onto the naked bodies and the islands are set adrift, lost souls crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind. Try it.
It can’t be denied that, for the moment at least, we have to have judges, don’t we?
Even in the details of daily life, I needed to feel above.
After all, living aloft is still the only way of being seen and hailed by the largest number.
I was at ease in everything, to be sure, but at the same time satisfied with nothing.
That’s the way man is. . . He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love.
If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent. . . that’s what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be just a joke.
It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in regard to all for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals.
I lived consequently without any other continuity than that, from day to day of I, I, I. From day to day women, from day to day virtue or vice, from day to day, like dogs -- but every day secure at my post. Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate -- for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
I loved them, according to the hallowed expression, which amounts to saying that I never loved any of them.
Of course, true love is exceptional. . . The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures. After stumbling upon this quote on another website and emailing the site owner, I discovered that Camus borrowed this line from an 18th century author, Samuel Johnson
No, it was not love or generosity that awakened me when I was in danger of being forsaken, but merely the desire to be loved and to receive what in my opinion was due me.
The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another’s bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.
I kept all my affections within reach to make use of them when I wanted.
Whoever is at hand is always first.
Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!
One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.
But the question is not to remain logical. The question is to slip through and, above all—yes, above all, the question is to elude judgment.
Today we are always ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
I realized this all at once the moment I had the suspicion that maybe I wasn’t so admirable. From then on, I became distrustful. Since I was bleeding slightly, there was no escape for me; they would devour me.
But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others.
In short, we would like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves.
I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me—which seemed to me merely an amusing game, or tiresome.
To be sure, I occasionally pretended to take life seriously. But very soon the frivolity of seriousness struck me and I merely went on playing my role as well as I could. . . I was absent at the moment when I took up the most space.
I lived my whole life under a double code, and my most serious acts were often the ones in which I was the least involved.
So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can’t gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It’s not navigation but dreaming.
In any case, I experienced a secret suffering, a sort of privation that made me emptier and allowed me, partly through obligation and partly out of curiosity, to make a few commitments. Inasmuch as I needed to love and be loved, I thought I was in love. In other words, I acted the fool.
Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores the silence, and above all, confers immortality. At a certain degree of lucid intoxication, lying late at night between two (whores) and drained of all desire, hope ceases to be a torture, you see; the mind dominates the whole past, and the pain of living is over forever. . . Because I longed for eternal life, I went to bed with harlots and drank for nights on end.
Alcohol and women provided me, I admit, the only solace of which I was worthy.
You know that even very intelligent people glory in being able to empty one bottle more than the next man.
There is nothing frenzied about debauchery, contrary to what is thought. It is but a long sleep.
Moreover, we cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state the certainty the guilt of all. Every man testifies to the crime of all others--that is my faith and my hope.
Wherefor, since we are all judges, we are all guilty before one another, all Christs in our mean manner, one by one crucified, always without knowing.
In solitude and when fatigued, one is after all inclined to take oneself for a prophet.
But the keenest of human torments is to be judged without a law.
But what do I care? Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and of what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Now my words have a purpose. . . of silencing the laughter. . . though apparently there is no escape.
Scorned, hunted down, compelled, I can then show what I am worth, enjoy what I am, be natural at last.
One day, or one night, laughter bursts out without a warning. The judgment you are passing on others eventually snaps back in your face, causing some damage.
The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden.
I have accepted duplicity instead of being upset about it.
I was wrong, after all, to tell you that the essential was to avoid judgment. The essential is being able to permit oneself everything. . .
But let’s now worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!
It was not always like this, of course. On occasion it's been worse. No matter, no matter.
Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me like a coffin.
I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly -- as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.
The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order.
What God? Where? Life-force, you mean? The principle of process? God as the history of Chance?
Talking talking, complaining complaining, filling the world I walk with words.
But reality, alas, is essentially shoddy.
There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.
The world resists me and I resist the world.
What I see I inspire with usefulness, I think, trying to suck in breath, and all that I do not see is useless, void.
I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things.
An angry man does not usually shake his fist at the universe in general.
Now, invulnerable, I was as solitary as one live tree in a vast landscape of coal.
whispering, whispering. Grendel, has it occurred to you my dear that you are crazy?
I too am learning, ordeal by ordeal, my indignity. It's all I have, my only weapon for smashing through these stiff coffin-walls of the world. So I dance in the moonlight, make foul jokes, or labor to shake the foundations of night with my heaped-up howls of rage. Something is bound to come of all this. I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!
My own history one second ago, has vanished utterly, dropped out of existence.
mumbling, mumbling, sacrificing the slain world to the omnipotence of words
Tedium is the worst pain. The mind lays out the world in blocks, and the hushed blood waits for revenge. All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal -- a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world -- two snakepits. The watchful mind lies, cunning and swift, about the dark blood's lust, lies and lies and lies until, weary of talk, the watchman sleeps.
For the world is divided, experience teaches, into two parts: things to be murdered, and things that would hinder the murder of things.
It's me or it.
Things fade; alternatives exclude.
Theology does not thrive in a world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. And it flourishes, it prospers, on decline. Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain.
Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.
I felt as if I were tumbling down into it -- dropping endlessly down through a soundless void.
Any action of the human heart must trigger an equal and opposite reaction.
To step out of the region of legality requires an extraordinary push of circumstance.
Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that. . .
I was forced to observe with a chill in my heart, my good, happy, carefree life, was becoming part of the past, was breaking away from me, and I was forced to feel how I was being shackled and held fast with new roots to the outside, to the dark and alien world. For the first time in my life I tasted death, and tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun thinking.
But you haven’t reached the point where you can understand the actual meaning of ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’. . . That is why each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden--forbidden for him.
Clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise.
Once again I belonged entirely to the world of darkness and to the devil, and in this world I had the reputation of being one hell of a fellow.
The more I realized that I was to remain perpetually lonely and different within my new group of friends the less able I was to break away. I really don’t know any longer whether boozing and swaggering actually ever gave me any pleasure. Moreover, I never became so used to drinking that I did not always feel embarrassing after effects. It was all as if I were somehow under a compulsion to do these things. I simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise. I was afraid of being alone for long, was afraid of the many tender and chaste moods that would overcome me, was afraid of the thoughts of love surging up in me.
I could not have cared less what became of me. In my odd and unattractive fashion, going to bars and bragging was my way of quarreling with the world--this was my way of protesting.
In any case, the life of a drunk is presumably livelier than that of the ordinary behaved citizen. . . the life of a hedonist is the best preparation for becoming a mystic.
That which is within you and directs your life knows already. It’s good to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than ourselves.
The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.
Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.
I wanted only to try and live with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
god’s name was Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.
When you know something about Abraxas, you cannot do this any longer. You aren’t allowed to be afraid of anything, you can’t consider prohibited anything that the soul desires.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
the majority’s path is an easy one
But the man who only seeks his destiny has neither models nor ideals, has nothing dear and consoling! And actually this is the path one should follow.
People that don’t follow the herd are rare everywhere.
People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.
They hanker after ideals that are ideals no longer but they will hound the man to death who sets up a new one.
One never reaches home. But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect the whole world looks like home, for a time.
We who wore the sign might justly be considered "odd" by the world; yes, even crazy, and dangerous. We were aware or in the process of becoming aware and our striving was directed toward achieving a more and more complete state of awareness while the striving of the others was a quest aimed at binding their opinions, ideals, duties, and their lives and fortunes more and more closely to those of the herd.
We, who bore the mark, felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take.
Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.
