On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  I could hear through the expanse of chambers and courtrooms an ice cream vendor blowing his tin trumpet out in the street. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed. The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing seized my throat, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get back to my cell and sleep.3

  As long as he could squelch these murmurings that it could be otherwise, as long as he could convince himself that this, indeed, was all he wanted, then this stranger could make a home out of exile: “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.”4

  Such resignation—the consolation of alienation—is the deep bass note in Camus’s corpus that makes his work resonate as contemporary. If Camus took this to be the human condition, it also echoed his experience as an Algerian expat, an émigré who never found rest in Paris. Sarah Bakewell recalls Camus’s “dislocated experience as a French Algerian, caught between two countries and never fully at home in either.” She continues: “Camus went on to spend much of his life in France, but he always felt an outsider there, lost without the brilliant-white Mediterranean sun.”5

  It’s little wonder that this experience is enshrined in a novel about l’étranger—the stranger, the foreigner, the outsider.6 It’s also not surprising, then, that the human condition is considered in the language of sojourn. But for Camus, this isn’t about pilgrimage; it’s about exile. In his notebooks, Camus once wrote, “We travel to cultivate our most private instinct, which is that of eternity.” We are compelled to look for home. What makes it absurd is that we’ve never had one.

  The journey is one of our oldest tropes for the adventure of being human. In many cases, the template is Odyssean: departure and return, adventure and homecoming, from bon voyage to welcome home.7 Even the lament of You Can’t Go Home Again (by Thomas Wolfe) rehearses the Odyssean itinerary by trying to go back. But the adventure of Camus’s exile is not Odyssean; it is Sisyphean. Joy is predicated on the impossibility of arrival.

  In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes the experience of the one for whom the illusions of rationality have been peeled back: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.”8 The world is inhuman, indifferent to us, and there are days, moments, seasons where its aloof strangeness swells to encompass our vision and we experience a vertigo, like looking at the Mediterranean on a cloudy day and the horizon vanishes in a bright gray. “If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer,” Camus remarks, “he would be reconciled.”9 But the world refuses.

  This strange disaffection bleeds into me if I sit still long enough. “Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.”10 “A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?”11

  The condition is exile, and happiness is embracing it. Relinquishing any nostalgia for home and any hope of arrival, the “absurd one” is the one who manages to make exile what he always wanted. The feat, the trick, is to learn how “to live without appeal.”12 Exile is the kingdom: “This hell of the present is his Kingdom at last.”13

  Imagine Sisyphus as a pilgrim caught in a loop, arrival always eluding him, accomplishment perpetually undermined. Sisyphus is the absurd hero for Camus because he embraces this perpetual pilgrimage of futility. “It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me,” Camus admits. When the stone has rolled away again, Camus praises Sisyphus for his trudge back down the mountain. Left at the foot of the mountain, the rock rolling back every time, Sisyphus manufactures joy in the effort: “All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.”14 He’s never going to arrive, never reaching the other shore, never getting to stay on the top of the mountain. But “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”15

  Must?

  Like Camus, we sometimes try to remake despair as joy. Never feeling at home, we turn our estrangement into a philosophy: “The road is life” is a motto you try to convince yourself is true when you never feel at home with yourself. And yet it’s hard to efface the home-hunger that even Camus admits is an impulsion.

  But imagine Camus’s philosophy as a message to actual migrants, to those risking their lives today in boats submerged to the gunwales, ferrying hopeful refugees across Camus’s prized Mediterranean, all too often failing to arrive. Or imagine young parents, toddlers in tow, making the harrowing journey from murderous Honduras to the southern border of the United States, parched and depleted by the desert journey, trying to cross this fabled line to apply for asylum, only to be refused and returned over and over again. Are they to look to Sisyphus as the hero? Should refugees’ hearts be filled every time they step foot onto another laden dinghy, casting out into the threats of the Mediterranean, wondering if this is the time they’ll make landfall, or perish? Is scaling the fence over and over again where they should determine they’ll find joy?

  Or do such Sisyphean philosophies—that “the road is life”—turn out to be bourgeois luxuries indulged by those safe enough to pretend this is all there is? Does the hunger and hope of the migrant show us something more fundamentally human? Maybe our craving for rest, refuge, arrival, home is a hunger that can’t be edited—the heart an obstinate palimpsest that suggests there might be another way. If there’s a map inscribed in the human heart that shows where home is, the fact that we haven’t yet arrived doesn’t make it a fiction. It might just mean there’s a way we haven’t tried. Maybe Camus gave up too soon. Augustine, his fellow African, might be a better guide.

  THE ALIENATION IS real. The sense of frustration, futility, of never arriving, never feeling settled with ourselves—these are not figments of the imagination to be papered over with pious assertions of homecoming. The way out of the experience of being fractured and fragmented and ill-at-ease in our own skin is neither Sisyphean redescription nor some born-again leapfrog out of the vagaries of the human condition. If there’s a way out, a way home, a way to oneself, it has to be a way through what Camus confronts.

  Of course, the most popular way to quell this unsettling sense of not-at-home-ness is by trying to make ourselves at home in the world, even if that looks like mostly distracting ourselves from the unsettling fact of our alienation. As Heidegger would put it—in a way he learned from Augustine—I am absorbed by “everydayness”; I give myself over to those “producers of bustling activity” who are more than happy to take the burden of selfhood off my hands.16 We learn to forget our alienation by letting ourselves be taken over by the distractions and entertainments and chatter of the world. We trade one sort of self-alienation for another that gives the illusion of homey comfort: “You belong here” is the lie told to us by everyone from Disney to Vegas. We try to cover up not knowing who we are by letting everyone else sell us an identity, or at least a distraction from needing one.

  This is why Camus’s honesty is a gift. He names—and gives permission to voice—those irruptions that unsettle this deal we’ve brokered with everydayness. Like those late-afternoon business meetings where everyone around the table morphs into strangers that we either loathe or can’t fathom, and we tire of the pointless monotony of it all and wonder, why bother? Or the way an airport discloses the sadness of the world and leaves us overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of the hurried endeavors of all
these deluded, self-important mammals scurrying through the terminal, an allegory for the cosmos.

  What Camus is honest about is what Heidegger calls Angst, the anxiety that emerges in such moments, calling into question everything that we consider to be the homey faux-comfort of our absorption in the world. In fact Heidegger himself, echoing Freud, describes this productive, unveiling anxiety as Unheimlich, “uncanny,” but even more literally, “not-at-home-ness.” When we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we’re at home with distraction, tricked ourselves into feeling “settled” only because we’ve sold our home-hunger for entertainments, then the irruption of the uncanny, a sense of not-at-home-ness, becomes a gift that creates an opening to once again face the question of who we are. Angst’s disturbing disclosure of meaninglessness is a door to walk through: it opens onto the possibility of finding yourself. Not-at-home-ness could be the place from which you finally hear the call to be yourself. If Camus advises us to wake up from our absorption and learn to live without appeal, Heidegger suggests that the wake-up call of anxiety might be how we learn to hear “the Appeal” that comes from beyond us, a transcendence calling us to something—calling us to ourselves.17

  THE UNCANNINESS OF anxiety, the gnawing sense of not-at-home-ness, could be a gift, its own sort of invitation to discover something about ourselves. The fact that we can’t shake it challenges Camus’s Sisyphean response that essentially counsels: “There’s no home; there’s no arrival; rejoice!” And the fact that such counsel trivializes the fatal frustrations of migrants makes one wonder whether there isn’t a bourgeois cosmopolitanism behind this celebration of never arriving. Bakewell’s take on Sartre’s notion of intentionality is telling: “We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.”18 “The road is life” is an exhilarating philosophy when you enjoy the comforts of a Parisian café.

  What if the human condition was understood not as Odyssean (a neat and tidy return) or Sisyphean (learning to get over your hope for home), but as being like the experience of a refugee? What if being human means being a cosmic émigré—vulnerable, exposed, unsettled, desperate, looking for a home I’ve never been to before? The longings of the refugee—to escape hunger, violence, and the quotidian experience of being bereft in order to find security, flourishing, and freedom—are good and just precisely because they are so deeply human. They even signal something about our spiritual condition: that our unshakable hopes of escaping a bereftness of the soul and finding the security of a home are not absurd. The exhaustion we experience from perpetually seeking, the fatigue of trying to live as if “the road is life,” the times we crumple onto the road just wishing someone could find us and take us home—the persistence of this hope almost makes us wonder if it could be realized.

  This experience of the refugee, the tenuous existence of one forced to flee and wander, is movingly captured in Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday. Zweig was a Jewish émigré formed by fin-de-siècle Vienna but uprooted by tensions and monstrosities that befell Europe in the early twentieth century: World War I, the Russian Revolution, and eventually the specter of Hitler’s Nazism (Zweig died in 1942). The memoir is very much an account of his uprooted life on the road, roaming the continent, migrating to London and eventually Brazil. Zweig captures what it feels like to be an émigré.

  Every form of emigration inevitably, of its nature, tends to upset your equilibrium. You lose—and this too has to be experienced to be understood—you lose something of your upright bearing if you no longer have the soil of your own land beneath your feet; you feel less confident, more distrustful of yourself. And I do not hesitate to confess that since the day when I first had to live with papers or passports essentially foreign to me, I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself anymore. Something of my natural identity has been destroyed forever with my original, real self. I have become less outgoing than really suits me, and today I—the former cosmopolitan—keep feeling as if I had to offer special thanks for every breath of air that I take in a foreign country.19

  There is more than one way to be on the road. There is, of course, a vulnerability to this experience—an exposure, what Zweig describes as a kind of dependence that he resents, a sense that his existence is a favor granted by others, that even the air he breathes is something for which he is obligated to give thanks. But what would it mean to “entirely belong to myself”? Is self-possession the way I find security? Or could even this experience be a door to a different way of being, where my dependence is not something I resent but something that I learn is the condition of creaturehood? While this might be an affront to my autonomy, perhaps it is my autonomy that is the source of my dis-ease, not its solution. What if dependence is a gift because it means I’m not alone? What if the welcome I experience elsewhere is how I learn to be human?

  In the same way that the uncanny experience of the absurd, the Unheimlich, the un-homey, can be its own sort of wake-up call, the experience of immigration can open up something in the self and shake loose habits that immersed us in the anonymity of “the they,” as Heidegger liked to put it. Zweig recounts,

  On purpose, I set out to avoid feeling permanently settled in Vienna, and thus forming sentimental links with a particular place. For many years I thought that my deliberate training of myself to feel that everything was temporary was a flaw in me, but later on, when I was forced time and again to leave every home I made for myself and saw everything around me fall apart, that mysterious lifelong sensation of not being tied down was helpful. It was a lesson I learnt early, and it has made loss and farewells easier for me.20

  Imagine a refugee spirituality, an understanding of human longing and estrangement that not only honors those experiences of not-at-home-ness but also affirms the hope of finding a home, finding oneself. The immigrant is migrating toward a home she’s never been to before. She will arrive in a strange land and, in ways that surprise her, come to say, “I’m at home here,” not least because someone is there to greet her and say, “Welcome home.” The goal isn’t returning home but being welcomed home in a place you weren’t born, arriving in a strange land and being told, “You belong here.”

  But that would mean the human condition is suffused with a tenuousness, tethered to a beyond that is our hope but that doesn’t magically alleviate the trials of the journey. The illusion of “settling down” in the everyday, settling for here, is one way to try to imagine you’ve arrived. But it is doomed to disappoint if you’ve been made for another shore. It’s not a matter of settling down in the vagaries of the present or of settling for what you can find, and it’s certainly not about living with the fears and injustices that fuel the hunger for elsewhere; it’s about knowing how to make the journey, how to adopt the posture of the refugee who travels light.

  One can see an oblique illustration of this in Zweig’s learning to travel light. We experience the deprivation of his enforced sojourn, but we also see hints of what an open-handed journey might look like. Zweig recalls his collection of autograph manuscripts: a page from Leonardo’s sketchbook; Napoleon’s orders to his soldiers at Rivoli; a novel in proofs by Balzac, “every sheet of it a battlefield of corrections”; a Bach cantata; an aria from Handel. He had hoped to leave the collection to an institution that would agree to keep adding to it. “Then it would not have been a dead thing, but a living organism refining and adding to itself for fifty or a hundred years after my lifetime, becoming an increasingly beautiful whole.”21

  But it is not granted to our much-tried generation to make such plans for the future. When the Hitler period began and I left my house, my pleasure in collecting was gone, and so was any certainty that something of what I had done would last. For a while I kept parts of the collection in safes at friends’ houses, but then, remembering Goethe’s warning that museums and collections will ossify if they do not go on developing, I decided that instead, since I could not devote my own efforts to perfecting my collection, I would say goodbye to it.
I gave part of it to the Viennese National Library when I left, mainly those items that I myself had been given as presents by friends and contemporaries. Part of it I sold, and what happened or is now happening to the rest of it does not weigh on my mind any more. I had enjoyed creating the collection more than I enjoyed the collection itself. So I do not mourn for what I have lost. For if there is one new art that we have had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collection, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy.22

  A refugee spirituality does not make false promises for the present. It is not a prosperity gospel of peace and joy in the present. It warns of the allure of imagining one could settle in and for the present. An émigré spirituality is honest about what is not granted to our generation, so to speak—what is not granted to the human condition in this vale of tears. Hope is found in a certain art of saying goodbye, but also in looking ahead to the day when Someone will greet us with, “Welcome home”—and knowing how to navigate in the meantime.

  LIKE CAMUS, AUGUSTINE was an African who ventured to Europe looking to make a name for himself—to “arrive” in both senses of the word, thereby securing his identity. And like Camus, he found there only a new sense of alienation. A provincial in the centers of cultural influence (first Rome, then Milan), he realized the limits of his welcome into the upper echelons of power. As his biographer Peter Brown reminds us, “Even the fully Latinized African of the fourth century remained somewhat alien. The opinion of the outside world was unanimous. Africa, in their opinion, was wasted on the Africans.”23 His accent is suspect, a stubborn hayseed halo around his eloquence.24 Even when he achieves employment in the emperor’s court, he surrounds himself with old friends from Africa who provide him with an outpost of Thagaste amid the busyness of Milan. He’ll never be at home here.