The last pages of a book are already contained in the first.
For him, too, 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 could hear Zagreus: “Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.
In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.
It is wrong, after all, to say that I have never loved. In my life, I have had at least one great love, always with myself as its object.
I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They’ll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject.
All I could see in his slightly lopsided face were his two very bright eyes, which were examining me closely without betraying any definable emotion. And I had the odd impression of being watched by myself.
Motionless now, Mersault felt how close happiness is to tears, caught up in that silent exultation which weaves together the hopes and despairs of human life. Conscious yet alienated, devoured by passion yet disinterest, 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.
If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled.
This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.
Naturally they don’t eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, sea-bathing, going to the pictures.
His face still in shadow, Rieux said that he’d already answered: that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely. Anyhow, in this respect Rieux believed himself to be on the right road – in fighting against creation as he found it.
Our poisoned hearts must be cured. And the most difficult battle to be won against the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice.
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
Conscious, he must be conscious, he must be conscious without deception, without cowardice – alone, face to face – at grips with his body – eyes open upon death. It was a man’s business. Not love, not a landscape, nothing but an infinite waste of solitude and happiness in which Mersault was playing his last cards.
I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy.
At first people had agreed to being cut off from the outside as they might have accepted any temporary irritation that would only interfere with a few of their habits. But, suddenly becoming conscious of a kind of incarceration beneath the lid of the sky in which summer was beginning to crackle, they felt in some vague way that this confinement threatened their whole lives, and, when evening came, the cool brought renewed energy and sometimes drove them to desperate actions.
Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world.
Quand tout le monde est militaire, le crime est de ne pas tuer si l’order ’exige.
But a man’s beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.
There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.