History as Revelation

Extract

Then, I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I’d taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.

This passage takes us into the prison cell where Albert Camus’ Outsider awaits his execution, watching the changing colours of the sky in the daytime, and looking out for the stars at night. The chaplain had come before but he had refused to see him. He did not believe in God, and now, with the little life that was left to him, the question whether God existed or not had no importance. So he released everything inside him, and shattered the priest’s hopes of doing anything for his ‘soul’.

During his life, Meursault had decided to do certain things and against doing other things, and all this time, he had been waiting for this moment, and the guillotine which was now very near. The priest with his talk about God and the after-life and divine justice, was merely an irksome interruption.

‘I’m sure you’ve often wished there was an after-life’, the priest in Camus’ story persists. Of course he had, but it was no more significant ‘han wishing he could swim faster or that he had a better-shaped mouth. The memory of Marie, and those fleeting hours on the beach when they swam out into the deep water, clambered onto the raft and lay down together under the scorching sun: these were the only things worth having now. As for a life after the grave—well, all he wanted was a life in which he could remember this one on earth. The priest continued on the subject of God.