The Bond Rediscovered

Yesterday we watched the word we appear out of a single act of revolt. Today Camus shows what that we is for. In Letters to a German Friend, written in secret during the Occupation and addressed to a man he had once been close to who now served the enemy, he explains, quietly, why he took the side he took. I merely wanted men to rediscover their solidarity, he writes, in order to wage war against their revolting fate.

Notice the word rediscover. He does not say invent, or build from nothing. He speaks as if the bond were already there, buried, forgotten, waiting to be found again. And notice what it is aimed at. Not at the enemy first, but at fate itself, the revolting fact of a world where the innocent suffer and die and nothing in the sky objects. Against that, one person is helpless. What the German friend had chosen was a philosophy of the strong alone, each man for himself, the world as a thing to be seized. Camus answers with the opposite wager. The only force that can stand against a crushing fate is people who have remembered they belong to one another.

This is worth holding onto, because solidarity can sound soft, a nice feeling to have about strangers. Camus means something harder. He means the practical alliance of human beings who have stopped pretending they can face the dark alone, and who turn, together, to fight it.

Today, think of one weight you have been carrying as though you were the only one who could. A worry, a task, a grief. Then remember it is not yours alone. Rediscover one person you can face it with. Solidarity begins the moment you stop waging your war by yourself.