Reality ... is random

Albert Camus

Camus is one of my heroes as his take on life echoes my own as reality is random, there is no certitude, only probabilities driven by the laws of quantum. As in Tao, the only constant, in reality, is change and the key to living the right way starts with assuming nothing, something Camus wrote about with clarity and power in all of his work.

With this being said, Alain de Botton's Camus on the Coronavirus NYTimes essay eloquently details how man copes with the randomness of death using Camus' The Plaque as prime example as to why this is so.

For Camus, when it comes to dying, there is no progress in history, there is no escape from our frailty. Being alive always was and will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable “underlying condition.” Plague or no plague, there is always, as it were, the plague, if what we mean by that is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless.

This is what Camus meant when he talked about the “absurdity” of life. Recognizing this absurdity should lead us not to despair but to a tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralizing to joy and gratitude.

Camus speaks to us in our own times not because he was a magical seer who could intimate what the best epidemiologists could not, but because he correctly sized up human nature. He knew, as we do not, that “everyone has inside it himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune.”

Alain de Botton