It sounds like a contradiction. How can suffering bring awareness of something eternal? Suffering is what makes us feel most temporary, most fragile, most bound to our bodies and their limitations.

But Camus is pointing to something specific. When everything extra is stripped away, when comfort and distraction and the noise of ordinary life fall silent, something remains. And what remains is you. Not the version of you that performs at work or makes small talk at dinner. The part underneath all that. The part that watches and endures and, against all reason, continues.

Anyone who has been seriously ill knows this. In the long hours of a hospital room, with nothing to do but exist, you discover that existence itself has a quality you had never noticed. You were too busy to feel it. You needed the busyness to stop before the deeper thing could surface.

Camus is not romanticizing suffering. He is not suggesting you seek it out. He is observing that difficulty has a strange honesty to it. It removes the insulation between you and your own life. When the padding is gone, you feel everything more directly, including the stubborn, surprising fact that you are still here.

See also: Knowing the Night | No Love Without Despair | Stoicism vs. absurdism