{"id":131861,"date":"2019-04-22T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2019-04-22T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=131861"},"modified":"2019-04-19T15:01:58","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T14:01:58","slug":"between-yes-and-no-heaven-and-earth-with-albert-camus-on-a-spring-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/04\/between-yes-and-no-heaven-and-earth-with-albert-camus-on-a-spring-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"Between Yes and No, Heaven and Earth with Albert Camus on a Spring Morning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u201cTo give up beauty and the sensual happiness that comes with it and devote one\u2019s self exclusively to unhappiness requires a nobility I lack.\u00a0 However, after all, nothing is true that compels us to make it exclusive.\u00a0 Isolated beauty ends in grimaces, solitary justice in oppression.\u00a0 Anyone who seeks to serve the one to the exclusion of the other serves no one, not even himself, and in the end is doubly the servant of injustice.\u00a0 A day comes when, because we have been inflexible, nothing amazes us anymore, everything is known, and our life is spent in starting again.\u00a0 It is a time of exile, dry lives, dead souls.\u00a0 To come back to life, we need grace, a homeland, or to forget ourselves.\u00a0 On certain mornings, as we turn a corner, an exquisite dew falls on our heart and then vanishes.\u00a0 But the freshness lingers, and this, always, is what the heart needs.\u00a0 I had to come back once again.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Albert Camus, \u201cReturn to Tipasa<\/em>\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

18 Apr 2019 – <\/em>For a writer to fight injustice to the exclusion of creating beauty and living passionately contradicts the deepest desires of the human heart.\u00a0 Albert Camus taught us this.\u00a0 The love of life must inform the rebel\u2019s resistance to injustice. \u00a0\u201cIt seems to me that the writer must be fully aware of the dramas of his time,\u201d<\/em> he writes, \u201cand that he must take sides every time he can and knows how to do so.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 But his refusal, his no, does not imply a renunciation but an affirmation, a yes, to the joy and grandeur of life that is everyone\u2019s birthright.<\/p>\n

This is the difficult way of true art \u2013 the rebel writer\u2019s way \u2013 the tension that the writer must live with as he shuttles back and forth between one\u2019s heart\u2019s desires and his commitment to resist evil.\u00a0 What is the point of fighting for a better world if one does not live as if that world were here now, and one\u2019s living and writing were the revelation of that reality.\u00a0 Camus somewhere said something to the effect that it is not your writings that I like, it is your writing.\u00a0 He knew that we are always on the way, and our wayfaring should prefigure the enigma of our arrivals.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Albert Camus<\/p><\/div>\n

It is spring as I write and I am thinking of Camus when that exquisite dew fell on his heart that early morning. No doubt Albert felt a bit of heaven.\u00a0 I\u2019m feeling it now.\u00a0 Spring, the time of the resurrection of the living dead.\u00a0 All around new life bursts and blooms in wild array. A mountain stream races down the hillside, shouting its joy that the earth\u2019s new warmth has freed it at last from its frozen sleep.\u00a0 In the trees all around the birds have returned and sing exultantly of their homecoming.\u00a0 Almost before our eyes the flowers push their way up to the light.\u00a0 They have had enough of the underground, hungrily seeking the sun.\u00a0 It is a beautiful dawn, and I can smell it.\u00a0 I feel as though I have awoken from a long and deep sleep.\u00a0 The morning star welcomed me. The sun rose majestically. And across my window three early flies jitterbug in the first light. \u00a0The whole earth is conspiring to explode with life and it is asking for our assent.<\/p>\n

But dare the living-dead awaken?\u00a0 Shall we say yes to this paradise?<\/p>\n

\u201cThis day you will be with me in paradise.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s what a man, convicted of crimes against the state and dying fast, once said.\u00a0 Like most memorable statements, it is open to various interpretations.\u00a0 But suppose, instead of offering one, we assume the existence of paradise, and ask a question that lurks unspoken and forbidden in every heart.<\/p>\n

For there are some questions so obvious that we refuse to ask them for fear of having to answer.\u00a0 To be asked such questions seems an impertinence, an insult to our intelligence, and an assault on our integrity.\u00a0\u00a0 Don\u2019t be ridiculous, we think, though we don\u2019t laugh. \u00a0Isn\u2019t it obvious, we vaguely mutter, secretly knowing it is nothing of the sort.\u00a0 We are caught off-guard, something we don\u2019t do to ourselves.\u00a0 Even our dreams escape us.\u00a0 We prefer to live in the clouds.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s be daring for once.\u00a0 Let\u2019s put aside all our usual lies and evasions and not be afraid of the truth.\u00a0 Let\u2019s ask ourselves a few very simple and annoying questions, the kind children ask their tongue-tied parents, and let\u2019s not squirm away from answering.<\/p>\n

What images of death do we live with?<\/p>\n

Or, to put it another way, if you believe in life after death, what image of heaven do you entertain?\u00a0 Not what do you think heaven is, but what do you desire it to be?\u00a0 If you object and say you don\u2019t believe in life after death, the question is still valid.\u00a0 For we are, of course , here playing a game of the imagination.\u00a0 You need only make believe, for the hell of it, that there is life after death. Or life before.<\/p>\n

What would you like it to be?\u00a0 Imagine.\u00a0 What would you like this life to be?\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s the real question.<\/p>\n

The trouble with being born, of course, is that we are guaranteed to die and be aware of it most of our lives.\u00a0 When it comes to dying, we have no choice; death is our fate and against it freedom is a meaningless word.\u00a0 Living is another matter, though it is not something we generally give much thought, for we can choose not to live when breath is still ours.\u00a0 We are free to wait lovingly for annihilation by patiently enduring our lives, or we can commit quick suicide.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have to live, but we must die.\u00a0 In our bitterness we may curse the fact that we find ourselves alive in the world; we didn\u2019t ask for it.\u00a0 This is obviously true and equally meaningless. Once we find ourselves alive, death is our destiny, like it or not. \u00a0Whether life is a living hell for us or just a dull plod through the years \u2013 a \u201changing in there,\u201d in those unconsciously evocative words \u2013 we hold in our hearts, however buried, images of what we would like life to be like if it were eternal.<\/p>\n

That is, we all live with images of paradise, no matter how beclouded or unarticulated they may be.<\/p>\n

Now, as I wander out in the early morning lulled by birdsong, I wonder what these images consist of.\u00a0 What, in our hearts\u2019 desires, do we yearn to become?\u00a0 What heavens do we wish to inhabit?<\/p>\n

For we are now in the school of imagination, what John Keats called the vale of soul-making, and must, like children everywhere, answer the following: Imagine paradise, on earth or in heaven, and describe it in as few or as many words as you wish.\u00a0 For future reference, learn your answer by heart.<\/p>\n

Camus wrote,<\/p>\n

Yes, nothing prevents me from dreaming, in the very hour of exile, since at least I know this, with sure and certain knowledge: a man\u2019s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the details of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, to open our hearts.\u00a0 It is na\u00efve, but not stupid.\u00a0 It is disturbing.\u00a0 It is surely easy to hide behind the word mystery, or cynically to reply that the world is what it is, a far cry from paradise, nor will it ever be, here or in some supposed hereafter, any different.\u00a0 The former is the believer\u2019s dodge, the latter the skeptical \u201crealist\u2019s\u201d way of begging the question.\u00a0 Both are phony.<\/p>\n

Only as we become as little children can we enter into the kingdom of heavenly imagination, and it is the fear of ridicule, our own and others,\u2019 that bars the gate.\u00a0 It is obvious that what happens after death is a mystery.\u00a0 Why we come and why we go is something that we\u2019ll never know, all beliefs to the contrary.\u00a0 We live by pure faith, though, as Thoreau noted, we are determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it.\u00a0 Which we can\u2019t, ultimately.\u00a0 Knowledge fails.\u00a0 And anyway, what we know and what we want are not the same thing.\u00a0 The images of paradise we hold don\u2019t illuminate death in the slightest; they do, however, enlighten our lives.\u00a0 After all, it is living that is within our power.\u00a0 We live in possibility.\u00a0 If we wish to pursue the ideal images of our heart\u2019s desires, we must first make manifest what they are.<\/p>\n

What do you want?\u00a0 I know it is not easy living with a deep but dark longing.\u00a0 Perhaps it is the fear of disappointment that keeps us in the dark.\u00a0 Why, when the whole earth rises toward the light, do we shrink back in fear?\u00a0 Does beauty crush us?<\/p>\n

I remember leaving my mother\u2019s house to go to the hospital where my dear father had just died. It was 5:30 AM on the first of May. Stepping outside, the birdsong and flowering bushes illuminated by the rising sun staggered me. How could this be: life and death in one hour, one moment.\u00a0 Where now was my father as his son walked through a garden of delight?\u00a0 Where was that man whom I had kissed a few hours before?<\/p>\n

What do I want?<\/p>\n

Albert, you wondered too when you created your alter-ego Jacques Cormery in your novel, The First Man<\/em>, and placed him at his father\u2019s gravesite.\u00a0 It was just a novel, as they say, but you were there and said,<\/p>\n

All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just once and one time only.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that it?\u00a0 No reruns.\u00a0 No playbacks.\u00a0 One life.\u00a0 Eternal.<\/p>\n

Then what?<\/p>\n

Perhaps our greatest fear is to passionately want something from life and death, \u201cto go beyond\u201d with Albert, to ask for something independent of society\u2019s and others\u2019 wishes, and to dare intuit it into existence.\u00a0 Society drones: Don\u2019t dare feel it, don\u2019t dare say it, don\u2019t ask for too much.\u00a0 Narrow it all down, life is much too much, narrow it all down.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I think that because so many people have meekly accepted this dictum that they are unconsciously in love with death, assuming that all their problems and the anguish of being placed between yes and no, heaven and earth will then cease.\u00a0 Oftentimes I think that we are living in the age of nihilism that Nietzsche predicted long ago, a time in which the will to nothingness is most clearly expressed in the sterile pursuit and embrace of things, a \u201cparadise\u201d of consumer goods at the expense of livingness.<\/p>\n

\u201cI cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things,\u201d writes Camus, grasping in a few words a key link between a just and unjust world where most people are subjected to violence and degradation at the hands of the wealthy and powerful who seek to devour the earth.<\/p>\n

Ah, but here we are walking in the spring sunshine, the time for resurrection and for truth.\u00a0 The whole earth is rising beneath our feet. We can feel it.\u00a0 The trees are budding forth and leaving toward the stars.\u00a0 We can see them. We can smell the earth warming in the rising sun.\u00a0 Perhaps like Camus, the spring smells seize us by the throat, and we find ourselves delirious with love and desire as \u201cthe gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves,\u201d as we wander through a reborn world.<\/p>\n

So why don\u2019t we say what we truly want?\u00a0 Can we even imagine it?\u00a0 Or is what we want so pathetic \u2013 more things, more money, anything to boost our egos and impress others, improve our appearances, elevate our social standing \u2013 that to admit it reveals the hollowness of our lives?\u00a0 Are our desires so vague and culturally constricted that they must be repressed lest they make us realize how spiritually dead we are when all around us resurrection calls us to awaken to new life?<\/p>\n

Suppose rather than hiding behind the lies and evasions that we use to divorce ourselves from the tree of life, we dare to speak from the indivisible root of truth and desire, or true desire, the eternal tree.\u00a0 For to live truly and to die is to create out of that planting a full flowering, an exposed existence rooted in the earth and reaching to the stars.\u00a0 Then, heaven will be our destiny, for it will proceed from our passions and usher in a glorious spring.<\/p>\n

And yet, as Camus knew, our little imaginary heavens can lull us to sleep when world events call to us to rise up and say no.\u00a0 Yes, but no, too.\u00a0 Desire needs will to renew the world.\u00a0 The lover who luxuriates in the spring sap rising must be a rebel.\u00a0 \u201cBut the true life is present in the heart of this dichotomy\u2026.Life is this dichotomy itself,\u201d he tells us.<\/p>\n

To live authentically is to live between yes and no.<\/p>\n

Dostoevsky, who shared with Camus the belief that we must rebel to save the world, had Karamazov rightly say that if all are not saved, what good is the salvation of only one?<\/p>\n

To which he added: \u201cLife is a paradise and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it seems on this morning in spring as resurrection fills the air.\u00a0 And even though this feeling will fade, Camus is right that its freshness will linger, an exquisite reminder of why we must rebel joyously.<\/p>\n

You are right, Albert, \u201cWe must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

18 Apr 2019 – For a writer to fight injustice to the exclusion of creating beauty and living passionately contradicts the deepest desires of the human heart. Albert Camus taught us this. The love of life must inform the rebel\u2019s resistance to injustice\u2026 You are right, Albert, \u201cWe must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[978,328,642,979],"class_list":["post-131861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-albert-camus","tag-freedom","tag-literature","tag-writting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}