The benign indifference of the world

For the first time in a very long time I thought of mother. I felt that I understood why at the end of her life she'd taken a 'fiancé' and why she'd pretended to start again. There at the home, where lives faded away, there too the evenings were a kind of melancholy truce. So close to death, mother must have felt liberated and ready to live her life again. No one, no one at all had any right to cry over her. And I too felt ready to live my life again. As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I'd been happy, and that I was still happy.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 117

Enough memories not to get bored

I ended up not being bored at all as soon as I learnt how to remember things. Sometimes I'd start thinking about my room and, in my imagination, I'd set off from one corner and walk round making a mental note of everything I saw on the way. At first it didn't take very long. But every time I did it, it took a bit longer. Because I'd remember every piece of furniture, and on every piece of furniture, every object and, on every object, every detail, every mark, crack or chip, and then even the colour or the grain of the wood. At the same time, I'd try not to lose track of my inventory, to enumerate everything. So that, by the end of a few weeks, I could spend hours doing nothing but listing the things in my room. And the more I thought about it the more things I dug out of memory that I hadn't noticed before or that I'd forgotten about. I realized then that a man who'd only lived for a day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He'd have enough memories not to get bored. In a way, that was a good thing.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 77