Merci Beaucoup, Albert

Albert Camus has to be one of my all-time favourite writers because he makes you aware of what literature can do, or at least that’s how he affects me. I’m not sure I entirely approve of the word ‘impact’ being used as a verb, but it’s an accurate description of the experience of reading Camus; he impacts upon me, leaving novel-sized marks stamped onto my soul.

In November this year, we celebrated his centennial year and several wonderful anecdotes about the man cropped up in newspaper pieces everywhere. The one that I liked most was the one given by Jean Daniel, who is a great French journalist and Camus's last living friend.

It’s the summer of 1951, and Camus’s book-length essay The Rebel will soon be published. The writer has taken his mother to a party with friends in Paris. After dancing with several women, Camus leans over and tells his mother that he’s been invited to the presidential palace. She is nearly deaf, so he repeats: “Mother, I've’ been invited to the Elysée!” Madame Camus is silent for a long moment. Then she takes her son’s ear and shouts: “Don't go, my boy! It’s not for us! It’s not for us!” .Camus never went to the Elysée, of course. The only palace this son of a cleaning woman ever entered was in Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize, and even then he went with much reluctance.

Born into extreme poverty, young Albert's family received a state pension after his father was killed fighting in World War I. He was a scholarship student educated by charismatic schoolmasters who had whisked him through the standard lycée curriculum, a writer raised by a grandmother who could not read and a mother who could not read and could scarcely speak. Although a socialist at heart, he was less prone to romanticizing the proletariat as his one-time good friend and later rival Jean Paul Sartre did, because for Camus words like “exploitation” and “subsistence” were gleaned not from revolutionary brochures but from life itself.

Camus was also a vigorous defender of human liberty, during the Algerian War of Independence he refused to choose a side between France which was his adopted homeland and Algeria which was the country of his birth. When he was heckled by an Algerian student in Stockholm, he said “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” Camus simply could not choose between the love of country and the love for his people. This reduced him to what he called an "Impotent Silence".

Camus taught me that in the hardest moments, one can do nothing but to keep on living.  Live the best way you know how. Move. Be kind. Be equanimous. Do what you can, but don’t waste your life feeling guilty or helpless or anxious. Get up in the morning and get your runners on and go outside and breathe the fresh air. Hug someone you don’t know. Practice acts of quiet rebellion in your everyday life. Rebel against anger, against traffic, against that wheel of thought that grinds you down. Rebel against your own mistaken beliefs about how the world is.

“My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

Truly yours,
Albert Camus”

Looking back..

As you make your way across the pebbles of a dry road that mounts and meanders like your lover’s mind, someone who you know comes and whispers---- you walk slowly nowadays. Is it the road; you wonder. Or the pebbles that break your pace? You walk fast. You always have. But what happened? somewhere down the line did the pebbles grow bigger? Or has the road become wider?

Suddenly you enter you room and start objectifying it. Instead of being a part of it, you start looking at it. You see it as your ‘young’ room. The room that witnessed a many of firsts. The first time you woke up embarrassed in the middle of the night, the first time you secretly hid the broken pieces of a vase and got away with it, the first time you put up a poster of Elvis and felt proud of it even if you didn't know who he was.The first time you watched pornography on the brand new computer which has now become faded, but proudly so.

This was the room that knew all your secrets. Like how you didn’t understand English songs, but felt intimidated when your school friends used to harp about them. This was the room that knew that the first thing you liked about your first crush was actually in your head, and you would never be sure if she was the same girl in real or not, and you didn’t want to. And now you see it as a room that saw all that. Now it has become the room you had when you were younger.

The leaves still fall from the bending trees in the dust stained roads of big cities the same way they had ten years ago. Cars honk, probably a bit more loudly, for they have gotten a little bigger. Children still run for their school buses and some parents still chase behind them.

School has changed too,certain teachers have retired though, some new teachers in the old schools walk around queerly in the same way as the old teachers did. Some old schools have a new coat of paint on them, but they would probably have the same scratches on the old desks. Streets tell the same stories and shops probably remain same, a thin line of silvery hair peeps out from the same shopkeepers but you don’t recognise.

The world often changes with a lot of pomp and show, but only when you change, do you realise, that the world that you think have been changing all along, must have changed a bit less than you have. And now you are old, but not that old. You just didn't realise it.

Suddenly elders don’t get surprised anymore to see you going to office in formals and how avoiding responsibilities isn't cute anymore. You didn’t realise that you probably tire out a bit too often, or your watchman is no more someone whom you can call “uncle” anymore. When while addressing you, a telemarketer uses Mr. (or miss) followed by your surname and your parents don’t tease you about it anymore.

Ahh,the parents..they don't change do they?The same mixture of childlike playfulness and ancient rigidity that both disgusted and enthralled you at different points of time. You remember the time when your mother became apprehensive about you spending nights out with friends, and the time when your father used to hold your hands to cross streets. In some years probably, you would do the same. On the same streets. Probably there will be a metro somewhere whizzing past above you. But I guess your father's hand would feel the same. 

I do know,that I miss my parents more than I let up.There has always been a barrier of sorts there. Maybe ,one of these days i'll call my dad up and tell him that I miss him and tell my mum how much i love her.

In the end,I realize that I am not so old,but the gravy train that's supposed to take me there is right on time.