[I am editing this blog almost two years later, so I have new insights to add and have re-hashed the entire structure of the earlier entry]
A friend did tell me that he considered this book a classic of existentialism, but I never realised how close he was already to living, really living an existentialist philosophy. Given my own bias towards a nihilist/existentialist/cynical view of the world, I wonder-is easier to be an existentialist than to live with one?
There is a loneliness in being an existentialist, the inherent emptiness of everything also seeps into the moment when our protagonist Meursault, receives a telegram “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don’t know. I received a telegram from the old people’s home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Very sincerely yours’. That doesn’t mean anything. It might have been yesterday.“. He goes for the funeral and returns to the city, “I thought that it was one more Sunday nearly over and done with, that Mama was now dead and buried, that I would go back to work, and that when all was said and done, nothing had really changed.”
When I re-read this during my recent edit, I am reminded of the time when we cremated and submerged the ashes of a dear little puppy. Her human-dad said “Chalo, ab P_ ka tata-goodbye bhi ho gaya“, a statement that was so harsh, but like a scab it covered an internal grief.
An existentialist can say and do the things they want to, because they have been able to reach the justification that everything is the same, and everything is nothing. But to live with an existentialist will be a path peppered with hurt and the constant crushing of your own ego.
Meursault, our existentialist, socialises with his neighbour Raymond, who has a battered Arab mistress “First he asked me if I thought she’d been cheating on him and I said that yes, it seemed so to me, then if I thought she should be punished and what I would do if I were him, so I told him that you can never know for sure, but I could understand that he wanted to punish her“.
Our existentialist hero continues on with his life and interactions with others, completely unhindered by consequences- because after all, nothing matters, to him atleast. “That evening, Marie came to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said that it was all the same to me and that we could get married if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I replied as I had once before that that didn’t mean anything, but said I was pretty sure I didn’t love her.
At last he falls into a consequence of his own action; one languid afternoon at the beach, Meursault kills the brother of Raymond’s mistress “Then I shot four more times into the lifeless body, where the bullets sank without leaving a trace. And it was as if I had rapped sharply, four times, on the fatal door of destiny.”.
“Why, why did you fire at a man who was already dead?’ Again, I didn’t know what to say. The judge wiped his forehead and repeated his question in a slightly different tone of voice” ‘Why? I insist that you tell me. Why?’ I remained silent.
Perhaps the rest of the world can never understand the non-chalance of an existentialist, the lack of motive for his/her actions. And the world, with the cruelty of the emotionally wounded beast, is not ready to forgive our existentialist hero. The world, when unable to explain the behaviour of the existentialist, begins to see his crimes as even more heinous than a patricide that occurred around the same time. The prosecutor rests his case, “and he was not afraid to say so, the horror which that crime had aroused in him was almost overshadowed by the horror he felt at my cold indifference. He believed that a man who had, morally speaking, murdered his mother cut himself off from human society in the same was as someone who had actually laid a murderous hand upon the person who gave him life.”
I started with an assumption that being an existentialist was a better option than living with one, but as you can see, with Meursault being marched off to the guillotine- it is clear that the world will not tolerate the one who has grown past his emotions. Or perhaps, even that does not matter to Meursault “Everyone was privileged. There was no one who wasn’t privileged. All those others, they too would one day be condemned to death. He as well, he too would be condemned to death. What did it matter if accused of murder he was executed for not crying at his mother’s funeral? Salamano’s dog was just as important as his wife. The little robotic lady was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Mason had married, just as guilty as Marie, who wanted me to marry her. What did it matter if Raymond was my friend as well as Celeste, who was a better person than him? What did it matter if Marie was now offering her lips to a new Mersault? Couldn’t this condemned man understand, and from the depths of my new future…I was choking as I shouted all this.”
[to buy this online, click here]
Sanctum Meum 