Happy Children and Albert Camus with his own poor childhood
The world needs smiling children not as sentiment but as philosophical proof. In Camus this proof is central. The absurd tells us that the world is silent and offers no final justification. The smiling child answers not with argument but with presence. He does not need heaven or history or ideology to affirm life. Sun and sea and play are enough. This is what Camus calls fidelity to the earth. Scholarly thought has often sought meaning in transcendence. Plato sought it in forms, Augustine in God, Hegel in history, Marx in revolution. The child refutes them all by simplicity. He is immanent. He lives in this day alone. His smile is not naive. It knows hunger and fall and fear and still returns.
Ethically the smiling child becomes a criterion. A politics, a religion, a system can be judged by whether it increases or diminishes the number of smiling children. Ontologically the child shows that joy precedes reason. Joy is not the conclusion of thought. It is its origin. The world needs smiling children because without them we forget why we revolt and why we must continue.
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 not into books and salons but into absolute poverty. His father Lucien, an agricultural worker, was killed in the First World War at the Marne in 1914 when Albert was less than a year old. His mother Catherine Sintes, illiterate, half deaf, working as a domestic servant, moved with baby Albert and his elder brother Lucien to a tiny dark three room flat at 93 rue de Lyon in the working class district of Belcourt in Algiers to live with her domineering mother Saint Brieuc.
There was no bathroom, no electricity at first, no books, no toys bought from a shop. Water had to be carried. The grandmother ruled with a whip. The mother could barely speak French, she communicated in gestures and silence. Camus would later write, Poverty was never a misfortune for me. Light was poured over it.
Yet that very poverty gave him his idea of happy children.
In The First Man, his autobiographical novel found in the mud after his fatal crash, he describes that childhood as rich because it was happy without reason.
He remembers football games played barefoot in the dusty streets of Belcourt with balls made of rags. Winning and losing was everything and nothing, the present alone.
He remembers swimming at the beaches of Algiers, diving from rocks, bodies brown in the sun, shouting, the sea close by, the same images that return in Noces and L Ete.
He remembers his schoolteacher Louis Germain who saw the intelligence of this poor boy and gave him free lessons and books. Without him Camus would have gone to work. He never forgot that a poor childs happiness needs a hand to protect it. He dedicated his Nobel speech to Germain.
He remembers that there was no future in that house, no plan, no inheritance. And therefore there was only today. The children of Belcourt did not need metaphysics to be happy. Sun, sea, a game, a laugh, that was enough.
This is why when his own twins Jean and Catherine were born on 5 September 1945 he understood them so deeply. He knew what it was to be a poor child who is nonetheless happy and what it was to be a father who wants that happiness to continue. All his life he was happiest in the company of Jean and Catherine at Lourmarin listening to their laughter in the garden. In his late Carnets and in his letters to Maria Casares he writes, "Their laughter saves me from my own reasoning" .
For Camus the happy face of a child, whether the ragged boy of Belcourt or his own Jean and Catherine, was philosophical proof.
First, the present alone. "The poor child has no tomorrow to rely on. He has only this sun. Camus loved sun and sea and blue sky and this day alone".
Second, innocent revolt. "The poor child falls, is hungry, is punished, and still runs to play. That is Sisyphus pushing the stone without appeal".
Third, joy without justification. "The happy child does not need a doctrine to be happy. He demonstrates life" .
In his Carnets I and at Tipasa, ,"gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe and children still play" . In Carnets III covering 1951 to 1959, "Jean has fever. Catherine laughed all evening. I am saved" .
In L Ete, Return to Tipasa and The Sea Close By, "boys diving and shouting are sacred without religion" .
In The First Man, Jacques Cormery ,"poverty is not misery because a childs happiness under the sun is wealth" .
In The Plague," the death of a child watched minute by minute is the moral centre. When that happy face is crushed every system collapses" .
Hence his axioms:
"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children."
"Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world."
The happy child was for Camus the final answer to the absurd, not an argument but a face. A poor boys face in Belcourt, a laughing face in Tipasa, above all the faces of Jean and Catherine in the garden at Lourmarin, a face laughing in the sun needing no reason, no heaven, no tomorrow, saying yes to this day alone, to sea and light and play.
( Avtar Mota )
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