Charles Dickens and Albert Camus

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a film that explores the writing of Charles Dicken’s

extraordinary tale, A Christmas Carol. It provides an opportunity, once more, to explore the deeper dimensions of our search for meaning and happiness in life. By chance, as it had its grand opening, I finished reading Albert Camus’ A Happy Death,[1] the first novel written by young Albert Camus, never published during his life and found only after his death. Camus drew on many aspects of the story in later novels, but even though he didn’t want I published, it is, in my opinion, a work that deserves attention. The protagonist is convinced that the goal of human life is to achieve happiness but finds it both elusive and complex. As in the case of A Christmas Carol for Dickens, in this story also there is much of Camus’ own journey and questioning.

The underlying message in A Christmas Carol is simple and straightforward: There are good guys and bad guys and, most wonderfully, the bad guy has a change of heart and becomes a good guy by abandoning his overriding greed for money. Its message? Happiness comes from generosity and compassion. The background is Dicken’s own life: His father was bankrupted and sent to prison when Dickens was young. He wrote the story to offset the possibility of his own bankruptcy after several literary projects failed.

In A Happy Death, Patrice Mersault is much darker than Scrooge and his journey toward a fuller life is much more convoluted. In the first half of the novella, Mersault is convinced that money does not make for happiness and lives in an extreme voluntary poverty. However, in the second half, money plays an important role in making happiness possible. He stops travelling and settles finally into a life of solitude. If the goal is to be happy, he searches first in the rhythms of nature and then gradually comes to appreciate a deeper connection with other people – something he has systematically avoided most of his life. The combination of both bring about a transformation that reaches a climax, paradoxically, in his death.  This is not a Dickensonian solution!

Dicken’s Christmas Carol and Camus’ A Happy Death both ground the meaning of life in happiness. In this, both are rooted in a tradition that goes back thousands of years to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Both agree that happiness is not to be found in piling up money. But, then, what is happiness and how is it to be found? For Dickens the answer is simple but not always easy to embrace. It is care for others, generosity, kindness. For Camus the conquest of happiness is not straightforward. It passes through two murders that provide the funds for a profound immersion in nature, in the sea in particular. In that immersion, Mersault finds happiness. By slowing down and savouring, through a turn to contemplation he finds joy. Yet, this very contact with the immensity and depth of the sea brings death! Camus is close to Plato and Aristotle while Dickens is inspired by the teaching of Jesus.  Is there truth in both?

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[1] Albert Camus, A Happy Death, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1972 (originally published in French by Gallimard, 1971). This is a short work, less than 100 pages. There is an epub edition.

 

Journal #2: Sustainability

 (Continuation of the Journal begun in the previous entry. The text dates from the early 1990s.)

World March of Women 2015 - Quebec

    When I was born World War II raged. At the end there was a promise of a new age of prosperity and peace through technology and science. And through the fifties and then the sixties, it seemd to deliver. Lester Pearson (then Prime Minister of Canada) offered "Atoms for Peace." Among the very first books I ever read in the local library was a simple explanation of atomic theory. I learned how reactors worked. I became fascinated with science. The green revolution promised prosperity for poor countries. The United nations, which I visited when I was 15, promised an end to war between Nations. Kennedy came along, with Martin Lucher King, and we dreamed of racial equality (in the U.S.A.). And then ... it began to unravel. And we began to recognize the limiations and not only the limitation but we began to take stock of the dimensions of resistance (from privileged interests, from the transnationals, from governments and the media, from the military, even from the rigid attitudes of the poor who had bought the dream - and from the Church. It was not going to be either easy or quick. The entire structure had to be dismantled and reconstructed. Maybe we'd never see more than some signs of utopia in our own lifetime.   ...
     The struggle for a sustainable way of living, a sustainable economy and politics involves a careful mapping out of a new way of understanding fundamental human ventures. It means a new way of looking at science and technology, of the secular and the rleigious. It is a question of revisioning, but it is also a quesstion of evoling a strategy of moving from where we are now. ...
     Chicken Little cried, "The heavens are falling, the heavens are falling." And indeed they are. The world will end. I have seen the world end several times in my life. ... But we learn to survive the crises and the deaths. Each provides a challenge and also an opportunity.

Emptiness

Many of us spend much of our life organizing ourselves so that our time is well occupied. This becomes more evident when we reach the age of retirement. We look for things to do: volunteering, visiting friends, tourist trips, reading. Some of us find ourselves watching more television, going more often to the movies or concerts. Much of this is both enriching and meaningful. But, how many of us spend time doing nothing: I mean just being still, not even thinking, paying attention to what “comes to us?”

I have been reading some of the correspondence of John Howard Griffin. You will remember that he wrote “Black Like Me” after ingesting, in the 1960s, a chemical that turned his skin black. He then spent about a month living as a Black man. His book caused a sensation in those days of the struggle for civil rights. What is perhaps a little bit less known is his struggle with the aftermath. The chemical wore off but provoked a cancer, diabetes, severe heart problems.  He endured years of extreme pain, blindness, and amputations. Through it all he displayed an enormous humanity. He did not at all see himself as a hero. Quite the contrary he was very conscious of how he rebelled against his fate.

All this leads me to consider what is at the heart of the human condition. Most of us want our lives to be meaningful. But what about those times, years, when there is no sense that what we are living through has any meaning at all – either for ourselves or for others: Times when we are totally isolated, in pain of one sort or another, feeling perhaps even that we are a burden to others?

In the Christian tradition, there is a strain – one I often refer to – that insists that God is the ultimate source of goodness and meaning in our lives. We live for the encounter with that ultimate “ground of being,” as Paul Tillich, used to refer to it. Yet, God is also always well beyond us, a call that draws us but to which we never really “arrive.”  Victor Frankl, a psychoanalyst, survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and a friend of Griffin, referred to this journey in his book “The Search for Meaning.”

In this context, the experience of God can only happen when we have been emptied of everything else, everything that could distract us, everything that could take God’s place. St. Paul refers to this in the letter to the Corinthians when he speaks of Christ’s kenosis, of how the Divine Word did not cling to divinity but came among us as human, divesting itself of all the divine prerogatives even to the point of death and death on a cross.

It is very hard, in practice, to actually make the option for emptying, that is to say, accepting that, at some point and at some level, what life offers us is empty and emptiness, and that we opt to embrace that emptiness as the threshold to the presence of God.

I remember a priest from Colombia giving us a talk long ago about how to deal with the enormous physical and psychological violence that was consuming Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. He suggested that we might be tempted, as indeed I was and at a very deep level, to feel that God was absent. No, he said, this is precisely the time when we should be attentive to God’s presence, in that deep and very dark void. For it is only there that the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, will be found.  Easier said than done!

Yet, he was right and still is. Those who embrace that path manifest enormous strength and provide hope for others. It is a privilege to meet such people along the way of life and it is even more a gift to be able to make the same option.