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. Clamence, in The Fall, has spent his life thinking of freedom as a prize. Now, looking back, he sees how wrong he was.
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. There is only the daily, unglamorous labor of steering your own life.
None of this is meant to discourage you, only to fix your expectations so you stop feeling cheated. If freedom feels like effort, you are not doing it wrong. Effort is what it is made of.
When the work of deciding for yourself feels heavy, read the heaviness as proof that you are free. Settle in for the long race instead of waiting for a finish line that was never there.
