Author: Albert Camus
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Evenings in these parts must be a sort of mournful solace.
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What few people were about seemed in an absurd hurry.
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But, oddly enough, though so much alike, they detest each other.
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He, too, once said to me, referring to Salamano, that it was “a damned shame,” and asked me if I wasn’t disgusted by the way the old man served his dog. I answered: “No.”
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I answered that one never changed his way of life; one life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well.
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Then she said she wondered if she really loved me or not. I, of course, couldn’t enlighten her as to that.
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I found him rather boring, but I had nothing to do and didn’t feel sleepy. So, to keep the conversation going, I asked some questions about his dog—how long he had had it and so forth.
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But, as a dog’s life is shorter than a man’s, they’d grown old together, so to speak.
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All normal people, I added as on afterthought, had more or less desired the death of those they loved, at some time or another.
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I was on the point of replying that was precisely because they were criminals. But then I realized that I, too, came under that description.
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Still, there was one thing in those early days that was really irksome: my habit of thinking like a free man.
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That, no doubt, explained the odd impression I had of being de trop here, a sort of gate-crasher.
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they all wore the same expression of slightly ironical indifference,
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For the first time I’d realized how all these people loathed me.
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these sounds made my return to prison like a blind man’s journey along a route whose every inch he knows by heart.
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How had I failed to recognize that nothing was more important than an execution; that, viewed from one angle, it’s the only thing that can genuinely interest a man?
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“Have you no hope at all? Do you really think that when you die you die outright, and nothing remains?” I said: “Yes.”
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He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.
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I’d been right, I was still right, I was always right. I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it.
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And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through.