Lotte

it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide

face to face

Albert Camus, Paris, March 1955

for PASCAL PIA

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.

On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying).

Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that be bad changed greatly since, and that that experience had “undermined” him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.

Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man’s heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.

There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection.

killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.

It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.”

All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world.

But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence.