On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 2

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

I am a very fortunate man. I have a family of my own, people I am tied to either genetically or because we have allowed our relationship to be sanctioned by state and god. I have a small family, just three of us. We are bound together, living out our collective life, in a wonderful mode of love and domestic tasks. I am very fortunate. But I haven't always been. I have had times of loneliness.

My times of loneliness were due to geography or circumstances. Circumstances are by far more remote than any geography can take us. Times of loneliness when I felt like there was no one else I could talk to, no one to save me from danger or from my thoughts, thankfully did not come very often. Again, I am a very fortunate man.

The love of another being, as according to Albert Camus, is the second point of his Physics of Happiness. I find it interesting that he would rank this point second. This point, although important, is secondary to life in the open air. The love of another being, and there is no specification on what the other being is, will deliver us into happiness.

I see connections all day. I see people talking with one another. I see the children in the school yard, their raucous games are frenetic and infectious. There are the people at the bus stops and in the restaurant patios talking and pointing and making connections. I see the small hordes of homeless people too, they sit on the sunny hillside on the far end of our city park, and they are engaged in conversation. We are social animals, we are creatures left best in groups, small groups or large groups. We talk with one another and we look on the faces and into the unspoken language of the body for feedback with those we talk to. It's wonderful.

But when it comes to the love of another being, this is a bit more involved, isn't it? More involved than the conversations at a street corner where we wait in a small band of pedestrians waiting to cross. Love of another being is that feeling we get when we put the welfare of another over our own and we rest easy knowing someone has done the same for us. We know we can be safe from assailants while we rest, taking sleep. We know when the time comes for feast, we have someone to share it with, and in times of famine, we have someone who can truly sympathize.

The love of another being is of utmost importance. It should be now, more than ever. For as many people as I see in my daily travels around the sun making connections, I see just as many, if not more completely sealed off, completely insular and cellular making a connection with a small electronic device. It begs the question, are these poor people alone, or just alone right now?

As I said, I am a very fortunate man. In my darkest times, the loneliest of times, I was never truly alone. I may not have had the love of another being, or I may not have accepted the love of another being, but I was not really alone. As a writer, and to a certainly as a reader, I always had someone else to consider, ponder, or think about in the stories I wrote or read. In my dark times, I would write the characters I thought I wanted to be, or the characters as the sorts of people I wanted to be around. When you are a writer you are never bored, you are never alone. Consider this: it is not healthy to keep imaginary friends into adulthood. It is not health unless you become a writer. When you are a writer, your imaginary friends are simply the characters in the world you construct for them.

But the characters in a story whether it be your own or that of another, cannot truly replace the real human connections and it cannot truly replace the love of another being. The love of another being is a gift. Taken the time, where are we to find such love these days? If taken organically, we will find the loved ones we need in close proximity to where we live. We have families, and colleagues and friends. We need not search farther than our communities. What about those of us who live in fast, dizzying urban city centers with a seeming endless sea of unfamiliar faces? Perhaps then, our loved ones are far away. What of it then? What about all the rest of the people spinning on this rock? How then should we love them? Or them, us? In that endless sea of unfamiliar faces, how do you carve out a friend, or a community or a loved one?

Can we truly be happy without the love of another being?