No Time to Enter
“He had lived at Tarrou's side, and Tarrou had died this evening without their friendship's having had time to enter fully into the life of either.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE PLAGUE
Tarrou dies right at the end, after the epidemic has broken, when everyone else in the city is beginning to be happy. Rieux sits with the body and thinks this.
They had months together. They worked side by side through the worst of it, they swam in the dark that one night, they told each other true things. And Rieux’s verdict is that the friendship never had time to enter fully into either life.
That is a specific and terrible kind of grief. Not the loss of what you had. The loss of what was obviously going to happen and now will not. The years of ordinary evenings that were the whole point of the beginning.
Most of us carry one of these. The person who moved away just as it was becoming real. The colleague you would clearly have been close to. The friendship interrupted by circumstance and still legible as the outline of something. Camus does not console anyone here. He simply refuses to pretend that a short friendship is a finished one.
If there is a friendship in your life that has not had time to enter it fully, give it some.
