I Have Need of Others

After the great sweep of yesterday, the whole host of humanity bound by destiny, Camus brings us back to something you can hold in one hand. In the calm final pages of The Rebel, he states the bond in the plainest words he ever gave it.

Read it again, because its simplicity hides how much it overturns. We are taught to treat need as weakness, something to outgrow. The goal, we are told, is independence, a point where we require no one. Camus calls that a fantasy, and a poor one. The self that needs nobody, he says in the same passage, is only a stranger in a world with no use for it. Real existence is the we are rather than the lone I, built out of mutual need running in every direction at once.

This is a gentler solidarity than the barricade, and in a way more demanding, because it asks you to admit your own dependence. You cannot belong to people while pretending you can do without them. The bond forms only when the need is allowed to run both ways.

There is relief in it, too. You were never meant to be self-sufficient. The ache of needing others is no flaw to be fixed. It is the very thing that ties you into the human world.

Let yourself need someone, out loud. Ask for the help you would rather not admit you want. Then notice who has been quietly needing you in return.