Cosmos and Camus. Shai Tubali
which represents our eternal longing. And so, the only thing a human being should be interested in is execution (TS, 110) – an unwavering acknowledgment of the limit of our life and consciousness. Such an acute recognition of being hanged sooner ←27 | 28→or later is one of the “few things” that “concentrate the mind” and cause an individual to come to oneself (Zaretsky 2013: 45–46). Indeed, the philosophical perspective conveyed through The Stranger seems to propose that one’s authenticity is put to the test by the Heideggerian “Being-towards-death” and is formed by the manner in which one faces this terminal limit (Golomb 2005: 130).
Between these four absurd walls, Meursault – “the most faithful incarnation of Camus’ absurd reasoning” (Skrimshire 2006: 288) – throws himself into an unsparing process of renunciation, which clarifies much of The Myth’s methodology of “persistence.” Camus’ philosophical criticism of scientific knowledge, religious belief and existentialist flight has one real purpose: to force the mind into a state of complete negation in order to allow an encounter with reality as it is. The “refusal to lie” is broadened to include even the subtlest form of mental escape. This is done with an “austere dignity” (Foley 2008: 22), a monk-like abstinence, which demonstrates that pushing the absurd to its “logical conclusions” (C, 45) does not imply a nihilistic freedom, but rather a radical form of self-constraint.
This brings to mind Camus’ imagining of another absurd hero, Don Juan, sitting in a cell in a monastery, close to death and contemplating, “through a narrow slit in the sun-baked wall,” a bland land in which he “recognizes himself” (MS, 74). Meursault, too, looks at the walls’ stones for months, and finds in them neither metaphysical consolation nor earthly satisfaction (TS, 119). One by one, he abandons any comforting habits of the mind and body: desires and sensual passions, sex and smoking (ibid., 82), the knowledge of books (ibid., 108), and logical arguments (ibid., 114). When the priest enters, the last embodiment of hope, Meursault feels that his cell is crowded and uncomfortable (Scherr 2014: 173). He learns the absurd through his attempts to evade it (MS, 110), thus rejecting faith as a “safeguard against suffering and despair” (Henke 2017: 137) and removing the “little painted screens” that the priest holds in front of his face to “hide the scaffold” from him (MS, 88). That is not to say that he does not experience moments of tragic consciousness and revolt against the limits of existence during his own dark, endless night of Gethsemane, awaiting his Antichrist crucifixion (ibid., 118), yet the struggle to escape the absurd, he knows, is an inseparable part of the absurd.
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An unexpected union
The Stranger’s last pages (115–123) elucidate, by means of an emotionally captivating experience, the shift from persistent negation to the happy Sisyphus at the end of The Myth. They begin with Meursault’s second violent outburst, this time at the prison chaplain. As the violent eruption at the end of Part I purged his being of nihilism and catalyzed a more mature response to the absurd, so the outburst near the end of Part II finally purifies his being of all hope, completes the process of negation and drives him toward absurd enlightenment. Herein lies the transforming potential of absurd revolt: Though it can never transcend the boundaries of absurdist reality, it ironically gives rise to the inner power needed to fully accept it.18 This joyous blind rage washes Meursault clean (TS, 122), preparing him for the final outcome of absurd negation. Like the Arab, the chaplain is merely a reflection of an inner mode, in this case the remaining contradiction still buried within Meursault. By proving that he is able to disrupt the chaplain’s complacency and metaphysical certainty (Henke 2017: 137), Meursault demonstrates that his mind has integrated to the extent that it is capable of rejecting any attempt to dissolve the absurdist tension. All of a sudden, this apparently simpleminded individual gathers together all the fragments of his life and mind to form a bold philosophical statement.
But what brings about Meursault’s sudden affirmation that everything he has is, truly, everything he desires (Skrimshire 2006: 288)? The Stranger’s last pages provide one with an illumined path: At first, the mind that comes to recognize the limits of existence struggles to release itself, but if instead it fervently negates even the subtlest form of escape, the negation finally places it within the limits, enabling one’s being to fall into the depths of this life and this universe. From within the limits, one can comprehend the universe from the inside. This, in turn, causes the universe’s internal powers and sources of light to awaken; thus, the dark night becomes “alive with signs and stars” (TS, 122).
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This is how absurd walls (MS, 9) turn into absurd freedom (ibid., 49); what appears superficially as a predicament devised by gods, who believed that there could be no greater punishment than futility and eternal repetition (ibid., 115), is transformed by the absurd mind into the happiest of all choices. If one is ready to be condemned, one is no longer condemned. Suffering is not Sisyphus’ rock, but rather his imagination that there could be another life at all (ibid., 118–119). Thus, the absurd mind holds an extraordinary power to find liberty “in the oddest of places – even Oran or Hades” (Zaretsky 2013: 37–38) – or prison, for that matter. If, in response to Nietzsche’s harrowing thought-experiment,19 it can sanctify that eternal repetition – if indeed the only other life it envisioned were one where it could remember this life (TS, 120) – the “divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting” would finally be mended (MS, 5). The life that was given becomes the life that is chosen, and the mind becomes unified with the experience.20
An uninterrupted awareness of the limits releases human consciousness from its prison while still being in it. In actuality, the more the limits press in from all sides, the greater the opportunity for liberation. Limits, The Stranger tells us, make us conscious, wake us up to the “Why?”, encourage us to overcome nihilism, and lead us to deliberately choose and accept our life. Their presence does not weaken the life-force, but rather enhances it, making us “ready to live it all again” (TS, 122).
Yet, this relaxation into the limits of human existence also opens a window onto a type of experience that is briefly introduced on the final pages of both The Stranger and The Myth. As Meursault calms down after the chaplain’s departure, he falls asleep only to wake up with the stars in his face; he is then flooded by the sounds and smells of the earth,21 and a tide of nature’s “wondrous peace” flows through him (TS, 122). While separating from a world that no longer means anything to him, he opens himself to the “gentle indifference of the world” (ibid., 122) and, with genuine ←30 | 31→happiness, finds the universe “much like myself – so like a brother, really” (ibid., 122–123). Correspondingly, The Myth concludes with a statement that as Sisyphus unites with his limited fate, the godless universe is no longer “sterile nor futile,” its now welcome silence allowing the countless “little voices of the earth” to arise and each atom and mineral flake of his stone and mountain to form a world unto itself (MS, 119). These poetic descriptions indicate that the feeling of the universe from the inside may lead to an absurd form of cosmic union.
Whereas the most fundamental experience of the absurd originates from the rift between one’s consciousness and life (MS, 5), those cosmic perceptions show one that by fully accepting the strangeness – the impenetrable mystery of oneself and the universe (ibid., 19) – the mind attains an odd kind of intimacy with the world, which goes some way toward healing this essential rift. Both mind and cosmos, knower and known, become, so to speak, brothers in strangeness, bathing in the same unknowable silent waters.22 “Making a home in one’s homelessness” brings about a revelation that one is tied to creation as much as one remains forever a stranger to it (Skrimshire 2006: 289).
This unexpected “harmonious bond” with the universe is uncovered “despite or because of this absurdity” (Golomb 2005: 130). Paradoxically, those who attempt to make the unreasonable world known and familiar, as well as those who strive to transcend it, are the true strangers and outsiders, and, thus, Meursault alone is the “one who is actually at home” (ibid., 130). At the end of the novel, we realize that imposing on oneself the limit of knowing can bring the mind closer to creation and that strangeness does not necessarily mean estrangement. On the contrary, those capable of feeling the universe from the inside have the ears to hear the earth’s own voice of