Yes, you’re alive again. Your letters were very dull indeed. But I understood that they were, and that this long absence after such harsh trials extinguishes your energy a little: I was waiting for life to flow back, to be brand new and brilliant, full of flame. And then it will disappear again. I’m like you in that respect. That’s why I can’t meditate when I feel you shrinking.
I have decided once and for all that we are united forever. So these are all light shadows. They pass, and there remains the soil of our love. But of course my heart is lighter when I read your joy or your tenderness, and it seems to me that personally I have fewer ups and downs. It just gets harder, that’s all. But it has to be to survive and also to finally get over the illness. I am patiently trying to regain control of myself, to regain the self-control that I had lost. For more than a year, everything that happened to me, except you, happened to me without my consent. I was dragged along by events, moods, the work itself, and finally the illness. And in order to accomplish what I still have before me, to be, quite simply, I need a continuous strength, a superiority over myself. Then I get up, slowly, I rebuild my will and my body. I’m not sure I’ll succeed, but I have to, failure would be terrible.
That’s why I can answer you when you ask me if I feel rich and generous. I don’t feel either, I’m too focused on doing well, on getting back in the game, to feel truly overwhelmed. But at least I’m gaining ground. I have always lived madly and it is enough for me to obtain from myself, for a period of time, a discipline so that recovery seems miraculous. Yes, I apply myself, I eat with application, I sleep with application, if I dare say so, and I calculate my efforts. But the truth is that, deep in my heart, I am sad to die from all those days lost for love, from your absence, from my pain in living my present life. Yes, I have to, that’s all I know. Yes, we have to.
How to love, how to create, if I am below myself! The person I was during this year disgusts me. And I must have the strength to live for us and for what I have to do. I am sending you those nuptials* that you asked me for. I have reread, here and there, some of the passages. What easy disdain! But at least I was alive then. It is this flame that I must find again, added to what I know now, and it seems to me that then you will be able to love me; you see, if we have enough courage for that, there are still long and great joys awaiting us. I live for them and for you, my tender, my darling, my beautiful face. I kiss you, I fill your eyes with kisses, I close your mouth. Courage, my dear love, courage for us and for the one who cherishes you from afar, but with all his heart.
Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, February 2, 1950 [#164]
* Albert Camus, Noces, Alger, Charlot, May 1939. It is the second book of Albert Camus.
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