A Strange Form of Love
“Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in fact, for the humiliated.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE REBEL
Every limit traced so far reveals its source in this one sentence, from the last pages of The Rebel.
Why strange? Because this love has no guarantees behind it. Heaven does not command it, and history promises it no victory. It chooses the losing side of time, the sick, the silenced, the small, knowing the choice may never be repaid or even noticed.
Camus’s complaint against the ideologies of his century was that they loved humanity in the abstract and were therefore willing to sacrifice humans in particular. The strange love runs the other way. It gives up the abstraction and keeps the particular person.
And now the secret is out. Every limit we have honored these two weeks was love wearing plainer clothes. The means we refuse, the children in the carriage, the victims’ side, the mirror declined. Each line we will not cross marks a place where a living person stands.
Keep one of your limits and know it for what it is. Not restriction, not squeamishness, but love in its working uniform.
