“Mother died today.”
That’s the opening line of Albert Camus’s novel, The Stranger. When I started reading it, my own mother had died a few days before.
His mother’s death doesn’t matter, is Meursault’s basic stance. Nothing does. This narrator in the novel is seemingly a quite ordinary person, but hollow, resembling a zombie. Yet not exactly; he does have feelings. But only, almost literally, mere bodily sensations. His feelings about his mother’s funeral concern only the heat, his discomfort, his fatigue, food, etc.
His girlfriend suggests marriage, and he casually agrees to it, but when she says it’s an important decision, he answers, “No.” He really does feel that nothing matters.
I was reminded of a repeated refrain in my own novel, Children of the Dragon — “Everything is nothing.” An expression of nihilism. It was faux profundity, a throwaway line, not a deeply considered philosophic stance when I wrote it in my callow twenties.
Nor is it a deep philosophy for Meursault. It’s just the way he is. Not even his nihilistic perspective matters.
Raymond is not really a friend; just a fellow who drags him into his own drama, Meursault merely along for the ride. A moment comes when Raymond may shoot a man, or not. It doesn’t matter, thinks Meursault. Raymond doesn’t shoot. But later on, Meursault himself does — five times, killing the man. Why? No reason. It doesn’t matter.
What does mattering mean? In the great scheme of things — a cosmos of billions of years, trillions of stars — Meursault is right — nothing about our little lives can matter. If the cosmos were conscious, we wouldn’t even register with that monumental consciousness. But that’s not the case. The only sentience is our own. Individually. At every moment of existence we have feelings either positive or negative. And that matters to each of us. Meursault’s sweltering or shivering does matter to him. He says so. And it seems such sensations are all that matter to him.
Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus, argues that all human feelings do resolve down to just physical bodily sensations. That physical pain and mental pain are not ultimately different because the latter is only “felt” in the form of bodily sensations. Thus Meursault is a very Hararian character. But I think Harari actually had it backwards. Indeed, all physical sensations are mediated by the mind; it tells you how to feel about them. Even pain is only painful because the mind deems it so.
I recall one episode (with a girlfriend) when mental anguish did entail literal physical pain. That was an extreme case. But even there it was the mental part — my conceptualization of the situation — that was the most unpleasant part of the experience. The physical sensations paled in significance. This reflects our having minds that think, producing a sense of self — one indeed so powerful that it’s upon that platform, of the immaterial sense of self, that we truly experience our joys and sorrows.
As the book concludes, Meursault is facing execution, and his indifference to everything actually finds its rationale: in the end, we all die, and everything is wiped away. I too am profoundly cognizant of that reality. But to me it makes everything we do, before dying, supremely meaningful. There is nothing else.
