Le monde est beau, et hors de lui, point de salut.
From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through.
Thus the growing complications of our everyday life, which might have been an affliction, proved to be a blessing in disguise. Indeed, had not the epidemic, as already mentioned, spread its ravages, all would have been for the best.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence. The servile rebellions, the regicide revolutions, and those of the twentieth century have thus, consciously, accepted a burden of guilt which increased in proportion to the degree of liberation they proposed to introduce.
Perhaps it was more painful to think of a guilty man than of a dead man.
How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character and habits.
For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
That’s what men are like, sir: two-faced: they cannot love unless they love themselves.
Today, in the face of abjection and solitude, his heart said: ‘No’. And in the great distress that washed over him, Mersault realised that his rebellion was the only authentic thing in him, and that everything elsewhere was misery and submission”.
Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come...
There lay the real danger; for the energy they devoted to fighting the disease made them all the more liable to it.
A little later, just for something to do, I picked up an old newspaper and read it. I cut out an advertisement for Kruschen Salts and stuck it in an old notebook where I put things from the papers that interest me.
I couldn’t imagine that this faint throbbing which had been with me for so long would ever cease.
Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
Together again, Marie and I swam out a ways, and we felt a closeness as we moved in unison and were happy.
So it came to this, that – against the grain, no doubt – the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order! This, I thought, was a flaw in the system; and, on the face of it, my view was sound enough. On the other hand, I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system. It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch.
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t my fault, but I stopped myself because I remembered I’d already said that to my boss. That doesn’t mean anything. Although actually, everyone is always a little guilty.
We live with a few familiar ideas. Two or three. We polish and transform them according to the societies and the men we happen to meet.
The only thing I’m interested in,” I said, “is to find inner peace.
But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence.