The Solidarity of Bodies

For three days we have talked about solidarity in large terms, revolt, justice, the human race. Today Camus brings it all the way down to the body. The line comes not from a book he published but from his private notebooks, copied there from a letter he had written to a friend lying in a hospital bed. The solidarity of bodies, he writes, unity at the center of the mortal and suffering flesh. This is what we are and nothing else.

There is nothing abstract left here. Strip away the ideas and the arguments and what remains, what actually binds us, is that we are all made of the same perishable stuff. We get sick. We get tired. We are hungry, cold, afraid, in pain. Every person you will ever meet is, like you, a body that can be hurt and that will one day stop. Camus, who nearly died of tuberculosis as a young man and lived his whole life in its shadow, knew this in his own lungs. He is not being grim. He is pointing at the plainest and most reliable ground of fellow feeling there is.

We forget it constantly. We divide ourselves by opinion and status and a hundred inventions, and each division feels enormous. Then someone we were sure was a stranger doubles over in pain, or weeps, or shivers, and the distance collapses. We recognize them at once, because we know that body from the inside.

This is the humblest form of the bond, and maybe the truest. Before we share anything else, we share mortality.

Today, let one body remind you. Sit with someone who is unwell, or simply notice a stranger’s tiredness on the train. Feel, underneath every difference, the fact you have in common. You are both mortal, suffering flesh. That is already almost everything.