Side by Side

Two sentences that refuse to resolve into one idea. The first is warm. We are made for company. Solitude is not our native condition, and people deprived of others do not become more purely themselves. They deteriorate.

The second is cold and true. Whatever else can be shared, that cannot. Nobody accompanies you into it. The most loving family in the world stands at the edge of an experience they are not permitted to enter.

Camus puts them together deliberately, and the second does not cancel the first. It explains the urgency of it. Precisely because the last part is solitary, the part before it should not be. There is no point rehearsing for an aloneness that will arrive on its own schedule.

People sometimes use the second fact as grounds for holding back. If we are all ultimately alone, why lean on anyone. That gets the logic backward. The aloneness is guaranteed and needs no help from you. The company is the part that takes effort, which is exactly why it is the part worth making.

Do something that only makes sense because you were not built to be alone. Eat with someone. Ask for help.