On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 4

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

Albert Camus's final point of The Physics of Happiness, Creation, is my favorite. In this one word, there are so many thoughts. When I think of creation, I think about everything from baking a batch of cookies to the Christian notion that god created the world in seven days.

In this physics of Camus, creation has to come last. In a way, the points before this one are necessary to promote creation. When I think about it, life in the open air is the stuff that it means to be human. The constant relationship with the day, the world in which we share with countless people, animals, stars, plants and sensations certainly opens the mind up to all sorts of thoughts and experiences. Love of another being too gives us the power to live our life in the way we as social beings need to have. When we have love, give love and share love, we able to move to the next set of desires. In a way, this is not different from what Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" tells us of our needs. And Freedom from ambition? How does that lead us to Creation.

I imagine once we find our place in the world, and we have it populated with all the important things, things that keep us going, I cannot see any other option than creation. Once we have ourselves ready for creation, we can do anything.

As a writer, I have always wondered about how involved I really was in the process. I mean, I grew up, I did things, worked jobs. I traveled. I got a little education. I decided to do as many things and live as much as I could. I felt like I should just live life to such a degree as prospecting for experiences I could later write about. Then, I got more education. And after that, I wrote for ten years. It was like this: I spent a good fifteen years having experiences that I would then spend ten years processing.

In this notion of creation, I believe that it is this: you must live life first. If you cannot understand the world, then you must at least question it plenty. You must love and lose love. You must want it all, have it all, lose it all. There must be these sorts of experiences. Then after all of that, gleeful, broke, broken heart, fulfilled or otherwise completed, then you can go home and write.

Creation is not exactly writing, and writing is not completely creation. But whatever form of creation a person chooses, this is profound. Imagine if the entire planet, right now, all seven-plus billion of us decided to order the our individual and collective world in some sort of artistic endeavor. What would happen? We would get nothing of the system done. We would, however reach a radical revolution. We would revolt against the establishment. We would revolt against the forces that tug us from the bad to good and back again. We each would create a sudden, if not complete picture of human art.

Creation.

What more is there we can offer?