acknowledgetheabsurd

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

You must have hated me today. And rightly so. You love greatness and I suddenly become infinitely small. That's what I've been afraid of ever since we met again. Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine love without the panache of pride. There is no intimate relationship between two beings, it seems to me, that can be sustained without a little sublimity. The heart knows this need well and provides for it. It bursts at every moment putting the supernatural and the superhuman everywhere, making any pout, any clumsiness, any platitude, into miracles.

Things don't happen the same way between us. Not being free, our hearts have, until now, only remained half-open, like poor wounds in the process of dying or healing - it's all the same. I've always trusted you to know in the end that you'll work it out because you know the value of things and you know how to subdue that part of you that makes the average life (the only one we can live, I know!) intolerable to those who make a fuss about it.

Yes I know that this is the only way of living that we can choose in the greater number of circumstances; I know that perhaps by adapting to it, by knowing how to carry it through to the end, we can make it the greatest thing we're entitled to, but to do so requires gifts, or else a colossal strength which I feel incapable of. That's why I've always been afraid. That's why I've always felt diminished in advance. I could feel it coming. It was already inside me. I hadn't thought that it would be happiness that would bring me the awful event. And yet nothing could be more logical. I've lived a few days with you that nothing in the world can ever take away from me, and if I have to grieve deeply there's at least one thing I'll be spared: bitterness.

Only, you know me well, and you know my blindness. I plunged into happiness with the rage of a wandering traveler in the desert who suddenly finds a lake of clear, limpid water; but I didn't have time to return to the surface; something caught me at the bottom and I stayed there, heavy and cold, suffocating with only one truly conscious thought: "It wasn't a mirage." You're going to laugh at me and all these words I'm writing you, all these clumsy, silly images I use here and there to try and answer what your eyes are asking me, the question that's always in you, my poor love, and for which I can't formulate a logical, concrete answer.

I can't stand the helpless look on your face in front of this silence which is so difficult for me to get out of. My poor darling: your gaze all stretched out towards me, everything throbbing, your hands, your three small vertical wrinkles between the eyelashes; all pulled towards me, … and this desire that I have to tell you, and I can't, I don't know, and when I blurt out a few words in an attempt to try, because I can't bear to leave you all alone when I'm so close to you, very close to you… it's precisely the words that shouldn't have been said, the words that give rise to misunderstandings, the wrong ones, the ones that had to be kept quiet because they don't fit…

Ah, my dear love, I only have to imagine you to lose track of what I want to say, to forget our misery, to forget myself too, and to become quite different, and suddenly very big, very rich and very tender. "I'm not generous with you," you let me say today. Do you know what it's like for me not to be everything to you? Do you know what it's like for me to be back in your arms, simply, without demands? Do you know what it means for someone who lives and dies of pride and the need for the absolute, to come home every night to imagine scenes of intimacy, even tenderness, happening elsewhere? Do you know, you who turn pale at memories that are no longer memories, what it's like for me to hear you say, "Francine, would you please light the lamp?" And Catherine and Jean and all those names I can't hear spoken anymore around me without capsizing, without feeling in the pit of my stomach like I want to vomit.

And all this is external to me, which flees from me; all this world where my imagination comes to a halt, with only you left in the midst, living far from me a life in which I am not part of, and which exists, which is more than a regret, that is more than a memory, that goes on, that is there and will always be there no matter what… Do you know what it is, you who close your eyes in despair to my poor little past life because you weren't there? It's like going mad, you understand, losing your mind, and I don't wish that on you. I went through that for a year, and it was only after too many bad nights that I let myself hurt you, but what do you expect?

My poor darling, so clear, so pure, so clean that I couldn't stop my demon from bringing you back with me through pain. Please forgive me. I'll be punished; if there is a hell, my punishment will be to look at you eternally from a distance and you'll appear to me surrounded by your shadows. I'll be punished, yes, but because I've loved too much and perhaps badly, but not for lack of generosity. I was generous with you. I still am and I never will lack of it, because I love you too much and I'll always love you too much to lack it. Even now, when I ask you to leave as soon as possible, when I suggested this last week, I'm being generous. Do you think I prefer your absence to having you against me, even if we have to remain mute and empty as we are today? You fool! I love you and if I don't know how to love well, I'm sure at least that I know how to love.

But it's true that I can hardly bear to see you unhappy, and right now I feel incapable of bringing you happiness. I can't lie to you, I don't want to put on an act with you, and for the last few days your presence hasn't been enough - as it often is - to bring me happiness and to make me forget that there are other beings in the world. You bring your shadows with you these days, and no matter how hard I close my eyes, close my ears, clasp my hands, as soon as I turn to you, you're no longer alone. Maybe this is the beginning of hell. What do you think? If I had the time, I'd try to get used to it, I'd get used to living with several people little by little; but there's your departure and the anguish it puts in me; there are these two long months apart, without letters, without anything except the memory that you left before, and that this is what had to be done, that this is what's right. That you left before, and yet it wasn't a mirage.

Ah, the blood rushes to my head. And I don't even have the right to revolt. And when something still eludes me, listen to the answer: "I'm ashamed." "And when I come back, what will have changed?" "You knew where you were going when we met." Or: "I'm going to buy the country house." It too will have hurt me. Finally, all this. I'll stop now. Too much of a headache - must be the Pernod. Courage and wisdom, that's what I need to make a resolution as an "adult". That's the mistake, I think. I'll try during these long months. In the meantime, rest as much as you can - don't do anything rash. If you no longer existed, far or near what would I have left? Watch yourself. Keep well. You'll find me the same, my love, the same with two and a half months more, the same all turned towards you, I swear it. I love you.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, early April, 1950 [#274]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

I who read The Plague and who see an intra-world ref to The Stranger:

moi qui lit La Peste et qui voit une réf intra-monde à L’Étranger :

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Do you think I prefer your absence to having you against me, even if we have to remain mute and empty as we are today? You fool! I love you and if I don't know how to love well, I'm sure at least that I know how to love.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, early April, 1950 [#274]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

My new babyyyy

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Please forgive me. I'll be punished; if there is a hell, my punishment will be to look at you eternally from a distance and you'll appear to me surrounded by your shadows.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, early April, 1950 [#274]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Sun and shadow. If I use these two words, thinking of course of Camus's Spanish origins, and of his taste for Spain, which has never wavered, it is because they can also summarize his thoughts and his work, his way of understanding life, the meaning of his fight. In a bullring, the sun is the place of the poor. The author of Noces himself said that he spent his youth "halfway between poverty and the sun." The shadow is the side of the haves. There we can find power, injustice, everything that makes men unhappy. Camus never supported this perversion of human nature. He calls it nihilism.

Perhaps because he was of very humble origin and had to fight to win the right to culture, he could not be content with being an artist. He is not a dilettante, nor a skeptic, nor a cynic. He seeks to create a coherent vision of the world, from which a morality will flow, that is to say a rule of life. If his first analysis leads him to conclude that it is absurd, it is not to indulge in it, but to seek a way out, revolt, love.

As for literature, for him it is not only a way of expressing ideas, or an art to which he devotes himself. It is a world that he, a humble child from Belcourt, born into an illiterate family, dreamed of, believing it to be inaccessible. Speaking of Gide, he said that he seemed to him the “guardian of a garden where I would have liked to live”.

We find this respect in the desire to write well. Style knows neither negligence nor carelessness. On the contrary, a pronounced taste for words, sentences, a certain rhetoric.

Such is Camus' universe. That's the right word. He emphasized that the contemporary writer "have given up telling stories in order to create his universe".

This need to put order in the world, to establish his certainties on solid foundations, led him to constantly construct overall plans in which he tried to classify all his work, to assign a place to each title, as to a piece of a vast architectural edifice. He repeated it in Stockholm, when he received the Nobel Prize:

"I had a precise plan when I started my work; I wanted to first express the negation. In three forms. Novel: it was The Stranger. Drama: Caligula, The Misunderstanding. Ideological: The Myth of Sisyphus. I anticipated the positive in three more forms. Novel: The Plague. Drama: The State of Siege and The Righteous. Ideological: The Rebel. I already saw a third layer around the theme of love."

Without repeating all the texts where he tries to systematize the succession of his books, we can cite, in the Carnets, in 1947, an overall plan which goes even further. It is true that it bears a sort of title full of doubt: "Without sequel." Here is that plan:

1st series. Absurd: The Stranger - The Myth of Sisyphus - Caligula and The Misunderstanding.

2nd series. Revolt: The Plague (and annexes) - The Rebel - Kaliayev

Third Series. Judgment - The First Man.

Fourth Series. Love sundered: The Stake - On love - The Charmer

Fifth series. Creation corrected or The System: Big novel + great meditation + unplayable play.

Curiously, these plans, if they seem to announce more or less distant works, like The Fall (The Judgment) and even The First Man which was interrupted by death, begin with The Stranger, forgetting the books published in Algiers: L'Envers et l'Endroit and Noces. Do they fit poorly into the diagram? Camus was very slow to accept that they were made known in mainland France.

But, as we have said, Camus is not an aesthete manufacturing graceful literary objects. Each of his books expresses the commitment of his thought, is inseparable from the events of his life, where he never stayed, quite the contrary, away from the struggles, the sufferings, the convulsions of the world. This is why this study of his books often led me to refer to his biography, to say where he was in his life when he wrote this or that work. Taking sides for or against Sainte-Beuve is a somewhat naive approach. Nothing should be excluded from what is useful for understanding a work.

In the Stockholm speech on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, the laureate declared, quoting Emerson:

"The obedience of a man to his own genius is faith par excellence."

Camus was inhabited by this faith. He never strayed from his path. This is what gives his work such coherence.

Roger Grenier, Albert Camus, Sun and Shadow (1987)

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Do you know what it's like for me not to be everything to you? Do you know what it's like for me to be back in your arms, simply, without demands? Do you know what it means for someone who lives and dies of pride and the need for the absolute, to come home every night to imagine scenes of intimacy, even tenderness, happening elsewhere? Do you know, you who turn pale at memories that are no longer memories, what it's like for me to hear you say, "Francine, would you please light the lamp?" And Catherine and Jean and all those names I can't hear spoken anymore around me without capsizing, without feeling in the pit of my stomach like I want to vomit.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, early April, 1950 [#274]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Messy pink nails and book ;3

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

I can't stand the helpless look on your face in front of this silence which is so difficult for me to get out of. My poor darling: your gaze all stretched out towards me, everything throbbing, your hands, your three small vertical wrinkles between the eyelashes; all pulled towards me, … and this desire that I have to tell you, and I can't, I don't know, and when I blurt out a few words in an attempt to try, because I can't bear to leave you all alone when I'm so close to you, very close to you… it's precisely the words that shouldn't have been said, the words that give rise to misunderstandings, the wrong ones, the ones that had to be kept quiet because they don't fit…

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, early April, 1950 [#274]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Albert Camus at a reception organized in his honor after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1957.

[x]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine love without the panache of pride. There is no intimate relationship between two beings, it seems to me, that can be sustained without a little sublimity. The heart knows this need well and provides for it. It bursts at every moment putting the supernatural and the superhuman everywhere, making any pout, any clumsiness, any platitude, into miracles.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, early April, 1950 [#274]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

I am like everyone else, big or small in my own time, beautiful or very ugly according to the times, very miserable today. My love is great, immense; it surpasses me and drags me I don't know where and I spend these days so close and so far from you at the same time, torn by a thousand contrary feelings, a thousand suppressed impulses, fears, expectations, impatience, regrets, infinite grief and above all, a kind of vague and colossal happiness whose nostalgia hurts me at times until tears.

I, too, now, hate dreaming and waiting; I hate loneliness, absence, unhappiness, barren life, myths, writings, telephones, projects, the burning memories; and yet I can no longer find sweetness than when I hear you; when you write to me, when, alone, cut off from the rest of the world I finally feel free to turn to you and imagine – "What I'm going to do… What I'm going to tell him… What I'm going to explain to him." And then, when the time comes, I don't know how to do anything, I don't know how to say anything, I don't know how to explain anything. I try, I try with all my might to appeal to everything there is in me to communicative, generous, free, I try to pronounce the right words so that you take my whole soul to the edge of my lips, so that you know, so that you can be at peace, but I'm hanging up and I can only tell myself again with horror all the mess of nonsense, banalities that I have just told you.

So I hate me. I'm disgusted. Sometimes I want to break the device. Alas! I won't even be able to hear your voice anymore as I wait minute after minute from 6 o'clock. Never forget that despite everything we are there, one and the other, that at the end of this long winter, spring and summer will return and let us possess the richest dowry on earth, a love that is not likely to falter. Oh yes, my darling! This is our comfort; this is where we must draw our energies and our courage. You're here. I am here. Imagine that I'm dead. Of course, I am well aware of the moments when the whole being refuses and rejects all these beautiful reasonings. I also know the naughty hours, the hours of doubt and of bitterness, the hours when we wish for a certain misfortune for lack of happiness that we believe we can give ourselves, the hours of drought, of annihilation.

Oh! yes, I know them; I'm not that big, you know?, but these are the only ones I disown because they have no weight. These are hours of death or sleep; they do not live. My love lives; my hope, my sorrow, my pain, my anguish, my expectation, my joys taken to your voice or to your writing, my heart beating when we phone, when your name is pronounced during a rehearsal, when people are talking around me about the piece that you wrote, live; the rest is just useless suffering, nightmare, bad digestion.

I want you happy and true. I trust in you and even if one day life had to separate you from me, in the end, my darling, I will understand and I'll love you. I know it – I know it, now. I don't like to talk, you know it well, but I have to resolve to do it during these coming months. And I cling to what life gives me of you. No more self-love, pride! The pride alone remains within me and I put it all in my love. My arms are open to you forever, my darling, no matter what.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance [#273]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

"But answer me. I'm begging you, answer me. Would you love me tenderly, selfishly? Would you love me if I was unjust?"

Albert Camus - The Just

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

I also know the hours of doubt and of bitterness, the hours when we wish for a certain misfortune for lack of happiness that we believe we can give ourselves, the hours of drought, of annihilation.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance [#273]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Albert Camus (1913-1960) at the theater during the adaptation of William Faulkner's book "Requiem for a Nun", 1956. 

[x]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

My love is great, immense; it surpasses me and drags me I don't know where and I spend these days so close and so far from you at the same time, torn by a thousand contrary feelings, a thousand suppressed impulses, fears, expectations, impatience, regrets, infinite grief and above all, a kind of vague and colossal happiness whose nostalgia hurts me at times until tears.

Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance [#273]