Preparing the Fruit
“Such is the strength of character that in the winter of the world will prepare the fruit.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE ALMOND TREES
The month ends with the image it opened under. Camus finishes his essay on how to survive a bad era by naming what will get us through, and it is not brilliance or force. It is strength of character, which he defines mostly by what it is not.
Not the theatrical kind, he says, with frowns and threatening gestures from a platform. The other kind. The sort that stands up to the wind off the sea because of what it is made of, quietly, with nobody watching.
And what that strength does is prepare the fruit. Not produce it. Prepare it. The almond blossom in February does not feed anyone. It lasts a few days and gets battered by the rain. Its whole function is to make possible a harvest that arrives much later, in a season the blossom will never see.
That is as good a description of persistence as Camus ever wrote. You are usually not the one who eats. You are the weather that the fruit needs in order to become possible at all. September has been about continuing when the work does not finish. October turns to the people you continue alongside.
Today, do the unglamorous thing that makes a later good thing possible.
