We have developed countless ways to avoid looking at death. We speak of people “passing away” or “losing their battle.” We hide the dying in hospitals, the dead in funeral homes. We scroll past mortality as quickly as possible, returning to the comfortable illusion that we have unlimited time.

Camus refuses this evasion. In A Happy Death, his protagonist Mersault approaches his final hours demanding full awareness. No comfortable stories, no soothing distractions, no cowardly retreat into numbness. He insists on meeting death the way he tried to meet life: with his eyes open.

This is not morbid fascination. It is the ultimate test of lucidity. If you can face the one fact you most want to avoid, you can face anything. The person who has truly looked at death, who has felt it as real and immediate rather than abstract and distant, lives differently afterward. Small anxieties lose their grip. Petty concerns reveal themselves as petty. What remains is only what matters.

The phrase “at grips with his body” is telling. Death is not a philosophical concept to be contemplated from a safe distance. It is physical, personal, yours. Your body will fail. To be conscious without deception means accepting this not as an idea but as a fact you feel in your bones. Only then can you stop wasting the time you have.