and time again

The morning begins fairly late at seven. There’s that bit of pleasure stripped away of not being able to glimpse the first rays of sun; it is either already gloomy or already too bright. Separate from witnessing the movement of time (at this hour), she returns to bed and feels that the pillows need changing.

M, aged twenty two, having deprived the childhood pleasure of possessing a teddy bear, buys a panda. It gazes at her with such indifference (it is precisely this indifference that separates it from all the smiling butterflies, unicorns, ladybirds). The housemate laughs at her excitement (she, having possessed four or five in her room herself), and so negates M’s experience. It now lies squarely on the dirty laundry basket in the living room; discarded, unloved. Indifference is met with indifference.

The morning is spent finishing the last thirty pages of Albert Camus’ A Happy Death. It is a tiring affair, reading the book, really. An unpolished vigor, but without innocence at all. Camus speaks of the dream of solitude. Mersault, having killed Zagreus, finally goes to build his dream house in Algiers with the money he took from Zagreus. Can solitude be a distant dream, something you have to work / or have money to achieve? Mersault, wanders around his new house, doing nothing in particular, thinks about his earned solitude, whether it is worthwhile or not. Contrast this to the scene he just watches people from his apartment window (the exact same paragraphs used in The Stranger, by the way), is that not solitude too?

The things I liked best was his description of time. Time, stripped of responsibilities (of work, commuting for days in the train, seeing your mother, feeding the dog, even of ‘seeing’ and lunching with people), one is finally confronted with one’s self. Here we see Mersault staring at his watch seeing the minutes go by, anxious at first (what is one to do, after all?), then tries to occupy himself with nature (watching the sunset and sunrise and the sky turn from orange to purple is a chore for him). I cannot guess whether happiness is in being idle or in being engaged in something. Mersault says, echoing Nietzsche, it is the will to happiness that counts. Therefore happiness is to be lived in the present, not as an ideal, but as a will.

(Of course, I always discuss this question of happiness with F, which he sees marriage as not being a prerequisite – perhaps to some extent, in opposition – to happiness.)

Another thing, does money buy more time? What is the value of time, perhaps? There’s a dialogue in Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, where the guy and the ear girl took the train together to the far ends of  Hokkaido. The girl probably remarked, that because things – journeys, chores – takes shorter time to be done, people are left with extra time. But it begs the question, what for? Watch movies, the guy said, in which they did in the end.

But verily, we are all in loss.