These words come from Meursault on the eve of his execution, after he has rejected a priest’s offer of religious consolation. They represent one of the most profound reversals in modern literature. What had seemed like a curse becomes a blessing.

We spend so much of our lives fighting the universe’s silence. We demand answers, signs, reassurances. We take the world’s indifference personally, as if the cosmos owes us an explanation for suffering, for loss, for the randomness of fate. This struggle exhausts us.

But what if we stopped fighting? What if we recognized that the universe’s indifference is not hostility but simply its nature, the same way water is wet and stones are hard? Meursault discovers that this indifference mirrors something within himself. He is not abandoned in a hostile world. He is at home in a neutral one.

This is not resignation or defeat. It is recognition. When you stop demanding that the world conform to your expectations, you become free to experience it as it is. The pressure lifts. You notice that you have been happy before, even in this indifferent world, and that happiness remains available to you still.