The Words He Could Not Find
“While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE PLAGUE
This is the other fact about Grand, and Camus puts it beside the unfinished sentence on purpose.
His wife Jeanne left him. He explains why with more precision than most people manage about their own lives. At the beginning they understood each other without speaking. Then that ran out, as it does, and at the moment it ran out he needed language and had none.
That is the whole tragedy of the man. He is not cold. He loved her and he still does. He simply could not produce the sentence the situation required, and so she went. And then he spends the rest of his life rewriting one sentence, trying to get it perfect.
The lesson is not that you should be eloquent. It is that the wordless phase of any close relationship is temporary, and what replaces it is the harder work of actually saying things out loud. Being understood without speaking is a gift with an expiry date on it.
Today, say the thing you have been assuming the other person already knows.
