“I imagine you tanned, radiant, quivering with life, and I would like to have recovered my energies so that this return [to you] is what it must be; an upheaval of the soul and body, the satisfaction of a tireless hunger.” These are words written by writer and reluctant philosopher, Albert Camus, to his lover, the actor María Casares. The two had a 16 year affair, penning letters to each other with such passion and eloquence that they have been collected and published so you too can swoon over them in their original French.
In a digital world where we’ve raced past email, myspace messages, and even texts, and are now instantly available on WhatsApp — where you can be ‘left on read’, or propose a tryst with a picture of an aubergine — it’s hard to imagine taking the time to painstakingly write out your feelings onto paper, actually go outside to post it, and then be forced to wait for a reply.
And now, we’re living on top of one another. In 2021, there is no absence with which to make fondness grow. The fondness stays the same. Or it dips, because the recipient has put things away in the wrong place, or because they walk back and forth when they’re on the phone, or because they’re just there all the time.
It’s hard to be alone right now, absolutely. But there’s a difficulty in never being alone as well. You start communicating in grunts. There is nothing new to talk about; you follow the same people on twitter, you watch the same programmes, and you are literally within 15 feet of each other every single minute of the day.
Sure, Camus can come up with these beautiful phrases: His heart spells out longing and distance with every amorous adjective. He has landed on a dock in Brazil while she is shooting a movie in France. There are painful vast seas between them, and they ache on either side for the merest sliver of assurance from the other.
For those who live with their significant others: When was the last time you yearned for your partner? These days so few of us have the opportunity. Camus and Casares could have days, weeks, even months of time to pine and thirst, while we only have minutes between farts.
But what if we took the time to remember what longing is like? Sat down at our desks to draft devotion onto printer paper. Let perfervid turns-of-phrase spill out our fingers like syrup; sweet and viscous and difficult. Can we push Amazon packages and incomprehensible maths homework out of the way so we might lay down heartfelt missives? Words that would sing if we can only dig them out of our brains, buried under headlines about politicians we hate and insta-stories from celebrities we can’t stand.
Write a love-letter. Rediscover your butterflies and let them swarm the page. Uncover that tireless hunger and beg to to have it satisfied.
