ALBERT CAMUS WROTE THIS IN HIS PRIVATE DIARY ,NOW PUBLISHED BY HIS DAUGHTER

                                       

                                    

Camus wrote it in his diary, in 1959, one year before his death ( Book : Carnets III, page.304)

"Rereading the Upanishads. A strange peace."

Only seven words. He had written books to explain the world. At the end he needs seven words. He says rereading. Not reading. He had met them before, when he was twenty, hungry for absolutes. He was fifty now, hungry for something else - not truth, but rest. And a book waits for you to be old enough to read it properly.

What had he lived through? He had believed in justice and seen justice become terror. He had believed in reason and seen reason become an excuse for murder. He had believed in fraternity and watched his own city, Algiers, his own friends, divide into those who kill and those who justify killing. He had asked the world for meaning, and the world, as always, remained silent.

For twenty years he had called that silence the absurd, and he had made of it an ethic. Hold fast. Do not lie. Do not kill. Love the light, even if the light does not love you. It is a noble ethic. It is also exhausting. And then, in a quiet room, he opens the Upanishads again. Not as a scholar. As a man who is tired.

The Upanishads do not argue with him. They do not say, Camus, you were wrong. They say something softer, and more devastating: you were looking in the right direction, but you thought silence was emptiness.

The sages in the forest say: that which makes you aware of the wound is not wounded. That which sees change does not change. You are not the man who is betrayed and denounced and alone. You are the seeing. He does not become a Hindu. He does not become a believer. He remains what he was: a man without appeal. Only now he knows that to live without appeal does not mean to live without grace.

Rereading the Upanishads. A strange peace.

He had to reread to remember what his heart had always known, that the soul, when it finally stops arguing with existence, does not fall. It rests.

And he wrote it down, as one writes down the date of a return.

( Avtar Mota )

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