I love Albert Camus. I will be presenting three excerpts from his "Youthful Writings". All of them have stayed with me, because in them I find reflections of myself, as well as some people who are very dear to me. And of course, because they are brilliant, give you the freedom to be free, and contain goodness and simplicity.
"Losing a loved one, uncertainty about what we are, these are the deprivations that give rise to our worst suffering. We may be idealists, but we need what is tangible. It is by the presence of persons and things that we believe we recognise certainty. And though we may not like it, at least we live with this necessity. But the astonishing or unfortunate thing is that these deprivations bring us the cure at the same time they give rise to pain. Once we have accepted the fact of loss, we understand that the loved one obstructed a whole corner of the possible, pure now as a sky washed by rain. Freedom emerges from weariness. To be happy is to stop. We are not here in order to stop. Free, we seek anew, enriched by pain. And the perpetual impulse forward always falls back again to gather new strength. The fall is brutal, but we set out again.
When some interest in our life crumbles beneath our feet, we transfer the interest we had accorded it to another possibility, and from this another, and again, without cease. An incessant need to believe, a perpetual projection ahead - such is the necessary comedy, and we shall enact it for a long time. Certain persons even play this pitiable game at the decisive moment. They review their whole life in order to persuade themselves of its nobility. A faint hope animates them.
Yes, there are deprivations, there are deprivations that give rise to our worst sorrows. But what does it truly matter what we lack when what we have is not used up. So many things are susceptible of being loved that surely no discouragement can be final. To know how to suffer, to know how to love, and, when everything collapses, to take everything up once more, simply, the richer from suffering, almost happy from the awareness of our misery."
