On Happiness and Love: Albert Camus
Posted on: March 17, 2016
Albert Camus on Happiness and Love,
Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton
“If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them …
they could perceive what they have made of us.”
By Maria Popova
In this new installment of the Brain Pickings artist series, I’ve once again teamed up with the wonderfully talented Wendy MacNaughton, on the heels of our previous collaborations on famous writers’ sleep habits, Susan Sontag’s diary highlights on love and on art, Nellie Bly’s packing list, Gay Talese’s taxonomy of New York cats, and Sylvia Plath’s influences.
I asked MacNaughton to illustrate another of my literary heroes’ thoughts on happiness and love, based on my highlights from Notebooks 1951–1959 (public library) — the published diaries of French author, philosopher, and Nobel laureate Albert Camus, which also gave us Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons.
The artwork is available as a print on Society6 and, as usual, we’re donating 50% of proceeds to A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women writers and artists. Enjoy!
If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them … they could perceive what they have made of us.
When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.
Betrayal answers betrayal, the mask of love is answered by the disappearance of love.
For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy.
Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.
The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all.
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
It is not humiliating to be unhappy.
Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.
At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.
I have not stopped loving that which is sacred in this world.
Get the print here.
For more literature-inspired art benefiting some favorite organizations, dive into the artist series visual archive.
For more of MacNaughton’s own fantastic work, see her book Meanwhile in San Francisco and her illustrations for The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert and Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology.
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