The Full Measure
“Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
The word to watch is maximum, and Camus uses it twice in one sentence. Aware to the maximum, living to the maximum. He is not describing intensity of experience. He is describing intensity of attention.
Which is a different matter from living loudly. Nobody is being told to quit a job or jump out of an aircraft. The maximum Camus has in mind is a maximum of awareness. Consider a song playing in the background, and the same song when you actually listen to it. Identical minutes. Only one of them is being lived.
Most of us are absent for enormous stretches of our own lives. The journey passes with no memory of the road. Half a conversation is spent assembling the next thing to say. Comfortable, successful, absent.
The invitation is simple to state and hard to take up. Pay attention. Not to everything, which is impossible, but to whatever happens to be in front of you now.
That attention is the revolt and the freedom and the passion, arriving together in one act. The maximum was never a peak experience. It is ordinary life, inhabited instead of passed through. You are inside it right now. Inhabit it.
