THE EMPEROR'S FREEDOM

This month already warned, on the fifth, that a freedom with no limit curdles into the rule of the strongest. In his play Caligula, Camus dramatizes that warning, and he does it from the inside, letting us feel its terrible appeal before we watch it destroy everything.

The young emperor, shattered by the death of someone he loved, decides the ordinary world is a lie and resolves to live without any limit at all. From this day on, he declares, so long as life is mine, my freedom has no frontier. He means to give the impossible a run, to be as free and as indifferent as the gods he despises. And he has the power to try.

What follows is not liberation but a slow horror. A freedom that recognizes no frontier recognizes no other person either. Caligula’s boundless liberty becomes boundless cruelty, almost casually, because nothing in his creed tells him where to stop. By the end he is perfectly free and perfectly alone, having turned everyone he might have loved into an object or a corpse.

Camus is not mocking the longing for freedom. He felt it himself. He is showing where it goes when it refuses every edge. The frontier Caligula throws away is the very thing that lets freedom belong to more than one person. Without it, my liberty just means your subjection.

You are not an emperor, but the temptation is the same in miniature, the fantasy that real freedom would mean no one and nothing ever telling you no. Today, when you feel that pull, picture Caligula at the close of his play, free of every frontier and loved by no one. Then choose the smaller, sturdier freedom that still has edges, and still has company.