“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time”

Albert Camus

Brief background on Camus: 

Albert Camus was an essayist, philosopher (although he denied it), novelist, and playwright, among other things. He is perhaps best known for introducing his philosophy of the absurd, illustrated in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. He won the Nobel Prize for his influential writing, in works such as The Stranger and The Plague, which have continued to hold influence today.

Keenly aware of the inevitability of death, Camus believed in fully embracing our time alive. He acknowledged, however, that many of us experience life as a gentle monotony. Monday morning, Monday night, Tuesday morning, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning…so on and so forth. Yet eventually, we ask the question ‘why,” and our “impulse of consciousness” is awakened, arising from some of the dullest circumstances. Our monotony is momentarily broken by our perception that to live is astonishing, wonderful, and absurd, and that our time is diminishing.  To be able to always keep that beauty, that feeling of being completely alive and aware in an otherwise monotonous world, would be bliss- we would be infinitely stretching out something that is always perishing. We would have made the most out of our limited time. This is perhaps why Camus says that beauty (that is- this feeling of being alive) drives us to despair; for us mere humans, it is impossible to stretch out beauty forever. We succumb back to our monotony and forget our approaching deaths, preventing us from living fully. How can one truly appreciate life if we are not aware that we must die? Immortality would be a curse because life’s preciousness comes from the fact that it will end soon, quicker than the flap of a butterfly’s wings. Camus’ despair is that our awareness of death, which equates to our awareness of life, is impossible to remember for the entirety of our lives. Beauty is not limited by death- death enriches it by endowing it with brevity. Beauty is limited by our lack of awareness of it, which we would like to hold on to. But, as we cannot hold onto it, we are left with grasping scraps of beauty wherever we can find them. In the spirit of “carpe diem,”

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

(To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick)

As “Old Time” continues to march forward, flowers begin to bloom and decline. The flowers can only satisfy our desire momentarily. When the flower petals fall, we desire them less and no longer find them beautiful. There is something a little tragic about this; beauty only lasts only so long as our desire, and our desires are impermanent. This sentiment is expressed better in Sappho’s fragment 16  (emphasis added):

Some say it's a force of cavalry, others of foot,
others of ships, but I say that the most beautiful thing
upon the black earth is whatever it is you desire.

It's easy enough to make this plain to all:
for she who was far more beautiful than any woman of mortal 
				race,
Helen, abandoned her husband - the best of men -

and went sailing off to Troy; she remembered neither her child
nor her much-loved parents, but Aphrodite
led her astray . . .

This has made me think of Anactoria, who isn't here.

Her step, which stirs desire, and the bright sparkle of her 
				face,
are dearer sights to me than the chariots of Lydia,
and armed men fighting on foot.

(Translation by Jim Powell)

Helen’s desire for Paris is depicted as beautiful, as is Sappho’s love for Anactoria (in this version of the story, Helen appears to go willingly with Paris). Yet, as many people who have heard the story of Helen of Troy know, Paris dies and eventually Troy falls. Paris’ love for Helen and Helen’s beauty does not prevent him from meeting his death or Troy’s destruction. In this sense, Helen’s beauty has disappeared from Paris; death has conquered desire. 

According to Sappho, Helen left beauty (her husband, child, and parents) in search for greater beauty (Paris), but we know her search is fruitless. This beauty is “unbearable,” for desire is rarely satisfied and even when it is, it dies quickly. Sappho can only recall the memory of Anactoria, because Anactoria is not there with her, just as Helen is not with her lover or her husband for long. Helen only receives “glimpses” of beauty with Paris, but even that is marred by the knowledge of the demolition happening in her name. 

The idea of Helen as the “most beautiful woman on earth” is intriguing, especially when one considers the suffering ancient (and misogynistic) writers credit her beauty for causing. In The Iliad, the elders of Troy catch sight of Helen and say,

‘Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder
the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty!
A deathless goddess-so she strikes our eyes!’

Her beauty is described as “terrible” and “deathless” and is a precursor to doom. While likely not at all what Camus had in mind when he said that beauty offers for a moment a “glimpse of eternity,” it is nevertheless interesting to note that the idea of beauty as something that is objectively eternal (or “deathless”) has been part of human thought for millenniums. Yet, so is the idea that from our reference point, beauty is finite. Although we have already mentioned the transitory nature of beauty from a human perspective, I feel that it is so central to Camus’ despair when he says “beauty is unbearable” that it bears repeating. Indeed, beauty can be observed as both eternal and passing, which is how we reached our rather hopeful conclusion earlier: that brevity enriches beauty, even while we are driven insane by that very brevity. 

To return to Helen’s terrifying beauty, we ought to consider the implications of power these depictions hold (even though Helen remains a passive agent in most adaptations of the story). Camus appears to view beauty in a similar manner, where beauty has the power to “drive us to despair,” as though of her own accord. Perhaps beauty is simply being used as a stand-in for desire, and the despair beauty can wrought is a metaphor for the lengths people will go to in order to satisfy their desire…only to then realize that with satisfaction, desire goes away and when desire goes away, so does satisfaction. Crispin Sartwell, an academic and philosopher, defines beauty as an “object of longing,” which is in keeping with beauty as a metaphor for desire. I heard once – or maybe read somewhere – that it is imperative that we die yearning for more if we wish to appreciate what life has to offer in the fullest. 

It is enough to say that I have lived once, I have felt once, I have seen beauty for a moment, and that I wish for more. Beauty may drive us to despair, but it also drives us to elation. It is enough to die unfulfilled, and happy.

Thank you for reading