The Long Race
“I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE FALL
Back to the Amsterdam bar, and the talkative ex-lawyer we met on the second of this month. Clamence, in The Fall, has spent his life thinking of freedom as a prize. Now, looking back, he sees how wrong he was. I didn’t know, he admits, that freedom is not a reward or a decoration to be celebrated with champagne. Not a gift, not a box of treats to make you lick your chops. No. It is a chore, a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
Most of us start where Clamence started. We picture freedom as an arrival, a state of having made it, the day the constraints fall away and we finally relax into being our own masters. It is the daydream behind the lottery ticket and the early retirement, freedom as the soft landing at the end of the effort.
Camus, through his weary narrator, tells the harder truth. Being genuinely free is work, and the work does not stop. Every day you are free, you have to choose again, judge again, answer for yourself again, with no one to carry the weight. That is the long-distance race. It is solitary because no one can run it for you, and exhausting because it never quite finishes. The champagne version of freedom does not exist. There is only the daily, unglamorous labor of steering your own life.
None of this is meant to discourage you. It is meant to fix your expectations so you stop feeling cheated. If freedom feels like effort, you are not doing it wrong. Effort is simply what it is made of.
Today, when the work of deciding for yourself feels heavy, do not read the heaviness as failure. Read it as proof that you are actually free, and settle in for the long race instead of waiting for a finish line that was never there.
