Living Life Without a Care

“ […] the stranger is man confronting the world. […] The stranger is also man among men. […] The stranger is, finally, myself in relation to myself, that is, natural man in relation to mind […] “

Jean Paul-Sartre in An Explication of the Stranger, 1955

Hardrock is blasting in my earphones. I look around. People are getting on the bus, going to work. An invisible wall seems to separate me from them. How pointless, I think. Everyone’s running around, robotically going about their lives. And I see myself too, moving around and completing tasks without any emotional involvement.

Without a care

This was a few years back, at a time where I was starting to understand, from multiple angles, why Camus referred to the question of whether or not to commit suicide as the only real philosophical question.

The Stranger was published in 1942. The world wasn’t quite alright. And Meursault, the novel’s protagonist and an anti-hero more so than a hero, is fundamentally alienated from it.

The book begins with Meursault burying his mother — or rather, reluctantly joining the burial. He is supremely untouched, giving significant thought to the logistical complications the prodecure is causing him.

Our protagonist is present, but not present in the Buddhist sense of blissful awareness. He is present in the sense of being entirely in the Now, unconcerned about what was or will be, but also mostly unconcerned about anything that isn’t pure matter of fact. He’s detached and everything’s just about the same to him.

He has us asking: what connects us to the world? What prevents isolation, alienation, a feeling of being terminally un-understood and fundamentally alone?

Many answers could be given. Connection with fellow human beings. Genuine, deep love. Finding meaning that transcends the minute irrelevance of the small details of our daily lives. Or, the modern romantic’s ‘finding beauty in the mundane’.

But here is Meursault’s take on love, when asked by the woman he begins an affair with the day after his mother’s funeral:

“So she wanted to know whether I loved her. I answered ... that it didn’t mean anything, but that I probably didn’t love her.”

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Not ‘I wasn’t in love’. Not ‘I was torn’. It didn’t mean anything, but I probably didn’t love her.

Imagine you ask someone whether they love you and they go ‘mm probably not, but doesn’t really matter’. It’s the indifference that hurts. The indifference to the other person — which is emblematic of our protagonist’s greater indifference to humans, to his own condition, to the world. Nothing means anything. The cosmos is entirely absurd. Meursault truly and unequivocally lives this reality.

He hasn’t intellectually decided not to care. And he doesn’t feel strongly about… anything apparently. He acts spontaneously in the present. I cannot help but notice the parallels to Buddhism or Eastern spiritual traditions. Meursault is also supremely detached.

But unlike a Buddhist notion of all-encompassing, spontaneous love, he doesn’t love, doesn’t care. Everything matters about the same amount to him — that is to say, barely at all. Nothing stands out. There’s a whole chapter of him spending a completely uneventful Sunday where he admits to being ‘slightly bored’. As if the act of differentiating between the relevant and the irrelevant was an impossibility.

Which makes sense if everything is inherently profoundly meaningless.

A profound alienation

Further on, Meursault helps his warm-blooded, criminal friend, bursting with anger, draft a note to lure his own ex-girlfriend to his flat and beat her up. He accompanies the same friend to his beach house where they get into a knife fight with a gang of Arabs. On the next day, Meursault kills one of them with several gunshots. When later asked by the prosecutor, why he did so, he answers “because of the sun”.

That is complete, baffling honesty. He might as well not have killed the Arab. The sun blinded him. Was it an accident? Had he planned it? Was he acting out of conviction, delirium or impulsivity? We can’t tell. There are no such inner monologues.

It happened, and to Meursault, it’s all the same.

During his prosecution, neither the prosecutor nor the attendees seem to care much about the murder itself. They’re utterly unable to comprehend his terrifying equanimity in the face of events that would have provoked guilt, shame, sadness, regret, fear or a million other emotions in them. Meursault, on the contrary, remains untouched — and just as unable to make sense of their interest in his reaction to his mother’s death.

The prosecutor captures the sentiment in the room, a kind of disturbed fear:

“The emptiness of this man’s heart becomes an abyss threatening to swallow up society.”

Prosecutor in The Stranger

It is a disturbing picture Camus paints. And it is so disturbing precisely because it touches upon something existential. It is the story of a man who truly and deeply accepts the meaninglessness of his own life and the world. He accepts it, and yet he lives on. Don’t expect to find an answer to why. But we might understand how Camus arrived at his opinion of there being only one real philosophical question.

This alienation from the world, the people around us and ourselves — to an extent many of us experience it at times, and in different intensities. I certainly have. Society at large and people around us have expectations for how we ought to react. How we ought to think, feel and behave. And often, there’s good reason for it.

But The Stranger also shows us how one individual doesn’t align with any of it. How he goes through life, untouched and unable to conform to any of the expectations friends and lovers, judges and strangers, place on him.

The realization

And yet, towards the end, our protagonist gets enraged for the first time as a chaplain is too persistently trying to get him to care about what he did — and an afterlife. Religious certainties are meaningless and nothing matters, he says. Then, he throws the clergyman out of his cell.

In a strange moment right afterwards, Meursault realizes:

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world, finding it so much like myself. […] I felt I had been happy, and that I was happy again.”

Meursault in The Stranger

Happy… and happy again. It is not like we would really find any reason to think so in the whole prior story. Or maybe — yes? The whole account is so matter-of-factly, Meursault may have been happy all along. Or not.

It might just be the same to him.

Meursault remains a stranger, even to the reader, until the end — one who seems to find some peace in that the cosmos is as strange, indifferent and devoid of meaning as his own existence. And we need not understand or like him, nor be sympathetic to his situation.

But some of this alienation is present within each of us — and The Stranger offers no cure, no simple way out. Instead, it portrays the full acceptance and surrender to this condition. And to living with it.