For Friendship's Sake

We close our days in the plague town with its gentlest scene. Rieux and Tarrou, the doctor and the volunteer who has organized the sanitary squads, are exhausted past speech. For weeks they have done nothing but fight the dying. So Tarrou proposes something almost scandalous in the middle of a catastrophe. They should slip past the guards, go down to the sea, and swim, for friendship’s sake. And they do. For some minutes they swam side by side, Camus writes, with the same zest, in the same rhythm, isolated from the world, at last free of the town and of the plague.

Nothing is accomplished. No one is saved by this swim. And yet it may be the most important thing the two men do. They have spent themselves entirely on others, and here, for a few minutes in the dark water, they simply are with each other, matched stroke for stroke, two friends and nothing more. Then they dress and go back to the fight. But they go back restored.

Camus knew that solidarity cannot run only on duty and grief. If the bond between us is only ever labor, only ever standing together against the dark, it burns out. There has to be this too, the shared pleasure, the wordless companionship, the swim that has no purpose except that you are alive together and glad of it. Friendship is not a break from the work. It is what makes the work survivable.

We forget this when times are hard. We tell ourselves that rest and delight are luxuries to be earned later, after the crisis passes. Camus says no. Take the swim. You will fight better tomorrow for having been, tonight, simply a friend.

Today, in the middle of whatever you are carrying, take one deliberate hour of shared, useless joy. Call the friend. Go to the water. Swim side by side, and let it be enough.