A Loved Face
“A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE PLAGUE
Yesterday Camus called love the one duty. Today he shows us its other side, not the duty but the hunger. This passage comes as Dr. Rieux watches an old man weep, and understands the tears completely, because he feels the same thing. A loveless world is a dead world.
What moves me here is the honesty about limits. Rieux is the model of duty in the novel, tireless, disciplined, always at his post. And Camus lets him admit that even devotion to duty runs out. There comes an hour, he says, when you are weary of your work and your responsibilities and all your admirable commitments, and what you actually want is simpler and more human than any of it. A loved face. The warmth of a loving heart.
This is not a weakness in the argument for solidarity. It is the ground of it. We do not bind ourselves to each other only out of principle. We do it because we cannot live otherwise, because a life of pure duty without tenderness would be a kind of death. The heart is not a distraction from the work. It is why the work matters.
Today, do not only be useful to the people you love. Be warm to them. Let one of them see a loved face when they look at you. That craving Camus names is in them too.
