The Solidarity of Bodies

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.

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, knew this in his own lungs. He is not being grim. He is pointing at the plainest ground of fellow feeling there is.

We forget it constantly. We divide ourselves by opinion and status and a hundred inventions. Then 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.

The next time you notice a stranger’s tiredness on a train, let it land. Sit with someone who is unwell. Underneath every difference is the fact you have in common. You are both mortal, suffering flesh, and that is already almost everything.