On Camus's The Physics of Happiness

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

The first time I was exposed to Albert Camus was The Stranger. It was in the spring time. I carried a copy of the slim volume in my school bag. On the outer shores of downtown Denver on the Auraria Campus, I read Camus while the massive clouds drifted up over the Rocky Mountains some few miles away. In my younger years, so much of my freedom, so much of the peace I knew, so much of how I would later shift and form my life came from books and records. Books and records and the hours I spent reading or listening to music. It was a spring day when I read Camus. I was outside in the grass and I could hear the sounds of a downtown Denver that was on the move, on the move from a dirty derelict little western town to a major metropolitan city resting right next to ceiling of the continent.

Albert Camus's The Physics of Happiness was still a few years away from me on that spring day when I read The Stranger. I would not have truly understood the pure simplicity or the profound depth of the few things outlined in his recipe. No, rather, I was introduced to it a few years later when I was about to embark on my life and the world once my studies were done.

Life in the open air.

When it comes to the first point of Camus's Physics of Happiness, life in the open air, it doesn't seem like it should be a difficult point. It doesn't seem difficult at all. Life in the open air. Whatever that may have meant to Albert Camus I doubt anyone knows. What it means to each of us may be different too. To me, it means just what it means, living in the open air.

At the time I first read these words, I was a very young man. I had no home. I lived that first year out of college in several places, San Francisco, Elbert County, CO, and in a few places between Lisbon and the Algarve in Portugal. It was a phenomenal time in life for many reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason was that I felt alive, I was alive and I was seeing so many things for the first time. When you see things for the first time, there is no other way than the pure excitement or joy that comes from new things.

But as I've aged, I feel like my countrymen in general have aged. I feel like I've grown gracefully, at least I hope I have. I do not feel the same about the rest of my countrymen. I feel like the short 20 or so years between the time I first read The Physics of Happiness and now, we have aged in a very, very nasty way.

When I consider Washington Irving's Rip VanWinkle, I think he would be a fascinating character in today's world. Remember Rip VanWinkle went up into the hills and took a little nap. The nap took 20 years and when he woke up, he found that his country had aged. The first thing that he noticed was that the flag had changed. The flag, of course, had gone from the Union Jack to the Stars and Stripes during his sleep. He noticed the growth of his town. The whole story is a satire on how quickly things had changed. The whole story was really about the fact that in one short generation, in this case, 20 years, the entire world was different. Washington Irving illustrated, most entertainingly, the shift from colonial America to a sovereign nation.

I suspect that any 20 year period in this modern age would be exactly the same sort of exaggerated change like the changes that Rip VanWinkle saw. And the 20 years from this moment looking back is absolutely no different.

Although I live indoors, I work indoors and I am indoors at this very moment, I am not a creature who is indoors exclusively. I think there are a good many people who are, however. I feel like the shift in our society over the last few hundred years has moved people from the rural areas to the urban. In rural areas, the distances are more vast. In rural areas, people tend to work physical jobs, they tend to work jobs that keep them out of doors. When out of doors, it is very easy to understand the way in which the days, the weeks, the months work. Being outside everyday, the way the light moves from solstice to solstice and back again is noticeably different daily. The migration of animals, birds, the small creatures, also noticeable. The phases of the moon, the wanderings of the planets, the seeming daily crop of plantlife, these things are all available to those who spend their time outside.

In the ever widening city centers, the story is different. Small animal migrations are not as noticeable. The horticulture of landscaped trees and flowers are not as dependent on the seasons. And when you're surround by tall buildings, the light of day is allusive and the stars at night are drown by street lights.

But life in the open air is still available to urban dwellers, suburban dwellers or those, like me, who have come to live in a small town. It's easy to get out of doors. All you have to do is take a walk, a bike ride, move. But I fear it's more severe than all of that. I feel like life in the open air has not been taken from us because of massive cities, but rather, very small screens.

How often I've been outside on a fantastic day moving from one place to the other while walking the sidewalks of my little town only to see other people walking too but each holding a device in their hands. Their entire attention is affixed to whatever it is they see on the screen. They are outside, yes, but are they really? What I think is that they are just as locked up in the hutch as a domesticated bunny and all because they are focused on a screen and not the world around them. They may be walking, which is exercise for the body, but they are not reaping the sensory exercise from the world around them. And without the sensory exercise, I fear for their mental well being and their imaginations.

Life in the open air, today, is definitely far from what life in the open air once was. Perhaps life in the open air today can be a small movement outside of a structure, a motorized vehicle and without anything battery powered on your person. What then of the imagination? What then of happiness? Of human happiness?