The chaplain insists on visiting, calls him “my son”, says he will pray for him. Something bursts in Meursault; he grabs the priest by the collar and pours out his heart: none of the chaplain’s certainties is worth one hair of a woman’s head. Nothing mattered, and he knew why — from the depths of his future, a dark wind had been blowing toward him across all the years.
Afterwards, emptied of hope, he opens himself “for the first time to the gentle indifference of the world” and feels that he had been happy, and was happy still. He wishes only that there be a large crowd of spectators at his execution, greeting him with cries of hate.
Lines to Remember
1 quotationsI opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
Je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.
Context & when to use it
For peace after giving up hope; acceptance without consolation.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsMeursault
Camus’s “stranger” — a clerk in Algiers who will not say more than he feels, kills a man on a beach, and goes to the guillotine opening himself to “the gentle indifference of the world”.
The Death of Cordelia
Lear enters carrying his hanged daughter, howling, searching for her breath with a mirror and a feather — “Never, never, never, never, never.”
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.
Epicureanism
The school of the Garden — a materialist philosophy aiming at tranquillity through friendship, simple pleasures and freedom from the fear of gods and death.
Abraham on Mount Moriah
Kierkegaard’s obsessive retelling of Genesis 22 — Abraham rising early to sacrifice Isaac — as the test case of faith beyond ethics.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Macbeth, told that his wife is dead, delivers the bleakest speech in Shakespeare — life is a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.