Fighting for Beauty

Near the end of Helen’s Exile, Camus makes a claim that sounds almost too lovely to be serious.

We are used to defending freedom in grim, practical terms, as a matter of rights, of safety, of not being oppressed. Camus denies none of that. But he insists there is something underneath. We do not finally want freedom in order to be efficient, or even safe. We want it so that life can be beautiful, so that there can be unforced love, real laughter, a morning that belongs to us, a long meal among friends with nowhere we have to be. Strip a life of freedom and you drain its beauty. The unfree life, however well-fed, goes gray.

The purpose of freedom is not freedom. The purpose is the beauty that only freedom lets in. Every refusal to be diminished, every wall named and crossed, every honest word has been, underneath, a fight to keep life worth looking at.

It is worth remembering when freedom feels like only struggle and weight, as it sometimes has this month. You are not fighting for an abstraction. You are fighting for the beautiful, ordinary things, the ones that cannot grow in a cage.

The whole struggle was for something small enough to hold. Light moving on a wall. An hour chosen purely because it is lovely. Something lingered over for no reason at all. Claim one of them before the month is out.