Journal Entry — “The Little Things That Make a Life”

 

I just finished watching Good Will Hunting, and I don’t know how to explain it — the film settled somewhere deep inside me. It wasn’t like the usual kind of movies I love (The Seventh Seal, Silence of the Lambs, God on Trial, No Country for Old Men). Those are stark, philosophical, heavy with questions about death, justice, chance, and the strange moral deserts of the human heart.

Good Will Hunting felt… gentler. But somehow just as profound.

It made me think about how life is more than just career, brilliance, or “making it.” We say this all the time, but the film actually shows it — in the little things, the imperfect things, the human things. The way Sean talks about his late wife, not with polished sentimentality, but with raw detail — the smell of a hospital room, the way imperfections turn into intimacy. There’s something painfully honest about that. Something I felt in my chest.

And then there’s Will. A genius who can solve equations that make professors sweat, yet terrified of the one thing that would make his life real: letting someone know him. Not the smart version of him. Him.

Maybe that’s what touched me the most. I realised how vulnerable it is to allow others into the places where we’re small — not brilliant, not impressive, just human.
And maybe that’s what I keep running away from too.

But the scene that really stayed with me was Will’s rant during the NASA/NSA interview. He basically tells them: “Sure, I could do the job. I could build something beautiful, sophisticated, brilliant. But somewhere, someone will die because of what I built — and no one will even know.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. The way Eichmann wasn’t a monstrous figure dripping with malice but a bureaucrat who stopped thinking about the human cost of his obedience. Will refuses to be that. He refuses to turn human pain into an abstraction so he can feel good about a paycheck and the illusion of doing something “important.”

It struck me how close this is to Arendt’s warning: evil grows when people separate technical skill from moral imagination.

Maybe that’s why this movie hit me differently. Because beneath the jokes and the Boston slang, the film is doing something I love — the same thing Pascal, Lewis, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and even Arendt do in their own ways. It’s asking:

What makes a life worth living?
Is a brilliant mind enough if the heart stays untouched?
Is success meaningful if you lose the little things?
The real things?

I kept thinking: life isn’t built in achievements; it’s built in human bonds — tender, risky, imperfect, but real. And maybe that’s where meaning hides, not in the grand narratives but in the small choices we make to stay human.

Maybe that’s the lesson I needed tonight.

A Trial Without a Soul: Reflections on The Stranger, Part II

An  Essay

Part II of The Stranger feels less like the continuation of a story and more like stepping into the dissection room of a human being who has no interest in being dissected. The trial is not merely about a murder; it is about the social impossibility of a man like Meursault. He enters the courtroom not as a criminal but as a disturbance, a body that refuses to supply the moral script the world demands of him. 

The lawyers, the magistrate, the witnesses, all attempt to pull from him the two things he will not offer: remorse and meaning. To them, the absence of remorse is more frightening than the presence of violence. It is telling that the magistrate reacts with more horror to Meursault's indifference than to the murder itself, as though the greatest blasphemy in this universe is not killing a man but failing to cry at your mother's funeral. 

Meursault's interactions with his lawyer reveal this tension immediately. The lawyer wants narrative coherence, a story, a motive. Meursault offers weather reports. The sun, the heat, the glare, the sweat—conditions of the body, never the stirrings of the heart. Even the lawyer winces when Meursault says that his mother's death was "no one's fault... just bad luck." What kind of man sees tragedy as an event rather than an emotion? 

The magistrate tries to remedy this through the most predictable of means: moral pressure. He brandishes the crucifix like a weapon, demanding guilt, sorrow, repentance. To the magistrate, Meursault's soul is a project that must be completed before the law can be satisfied. But Meursault will not provide the required material. He agrees with the magistrate when he grows bored; he resists when pushed; he offers fact when emotion is demanded. In the end, he is dismissed not as a sinner but as an anomaly. 

Yet there is a strange irony here worth contemplating. Meursault is almost more honest about God than the magistrate is. Meursault refuses the comfort of illusion, while the magistrate demands it. In demanding repentance, the magistrate reveals his own need for the performance of faith. But Meursault, in his refusal to repent, in his insistence on seeing things as they are, performs a kind of radical authenticity. He will not lie to God or to himself about his inner state. Whether this constitutes spiritual integrity or spiritual death depends entirely on one's theology. 

Prison in Part II is almost a social experiment in miniature. Meursault's honesty becomes, as one might notice, not virtue but danger. When asked by Arab prisoners what he did, he says: "I killed an Arab." No hesitation, no self-preservation, no grasp of consequence. His honesty is mechanical, not moral. This small moment exposes Meursault's true condition: he is not brave or noble but incapable of adjusting himself to a world governed by fear, courtesy, or moral tact. 

The mention of the Arab here deserves deeper reflection. Throughout the novel, the Arab remains unnamed, faceless, voiceless—completely erased from the narrative except as the object of Meursault's action. While Meursault encounters others (Marie, Raymond, Salamano, the lawyer) and refuses to truly see them as souls, the Arab is the only person he actually kills. And in killing him, Meursault commits not just a physical act but a spiritual one: the complete negation of another's existence. It is worth asking whether Camus is suggesting that Meursault's spiritual blindness has a specific target—the marginalized, the foreigner, those already rendered invisible by society. The Arab is already treated as less-than-human by the French colonial context. Meursault simply does not see him as human at all. 

Inside his cell, his imagination becomes his refuge and his prison. He misses Marie, but the longing remains wholly sensual—her body, her warmth, the physical world he can no longer touch. The emotional world remains as distant as it was at the funeral. When he discovers the story of the Czechs in the ruined newspaper, his reaction reveals everything. While most readers might recoil at the mother killing her own disguised son, Meursault blames the son for lying. Had he been honest, he thinks, there would have been no tragedy. 

It is a revelation that cuts to the core of Meursault's condition: in his moral universe, deception is the only real sin. Not murder, not betrayal, not cruelty—only the failure to present things as they are. But what this story actually reveals is something more troubling. Meursault cannot grasp that actions have consequence beyond their surface facts. To blame the son for lying rather than the mother for killing suggests that Meursault cannot imagine the *future suffering* his actions cause, because he cannot imagine the interior life of others. The lie requires imagining what another person will *feel*. The killing just happens. He values what appears to be honesty, but he actually values the absence of moral imagination. To speak plainly is his only commandment—because plain speech requires no understanding of another's soul. 

The trial becomes a grotesque theater in which Meursault watches himself performed by others. Céleste, Raymond, Marie—each attempts to save him by offering interpretations, backstories, character witnesses. Meursault observes them with a strange tenderness and irritation. He is moved by Céleste's goodness but also annoyed that he must be explained, defended, reshaped into someone he is not. The prosecutor, with his theatrics and polished rhetoric, becomes to Meursault almost admirable—a talented performer in a spectacle Meursault recognizes but does not belong to. 

And the crowd—hungry, curious, entertained—arrives not to learn the truth but to witness a moral judgment disguised as legal procedure. They convict him not because he killed a man, but because he did not mourn his mother. The court transforms the private habits of his heart into evidence of monstrousness. His day at the beach becomes a parable of depravity. The comedy he watched the next day becomes proof of his inhumanity. 

What emerges from this trial is a profound revelation: society does not need justice; it needs *narrative satisfaction*. It needs to see suffering, remorse, the performance of a conscience. Without it, the trial becomes obscene—a legal procedure with no moral defendant, only a body being tried. The law, it seems, cannot function without a soul to condemn. And in this demand for narrative, society reveals its own desperation: we require others to perform their guilt so that we can confirm our own moral coherence. Meursault's refusal to perform is thus not merely a personal failing but a radical critique of how we use emotion as social currency, how we demand that people's inner lives conform to our expectations of justice. 

It is a trial of personality, not action. A verdict on his soul, not his crime. 

In the end, sentenced to death, Meursault contemplates the nature of his end with a clarity that would seem almost spiritual if it were not so resistant to the spiritual. When the chaplain comes—kind, earnest, desperate to offer God in the last moments of life—Meursault finally erupts. Their conversation is not a bridge between worlds; it is a collision. The chaplain clings to mercy, repentance, forgiveness; Meursault clings to sun, sea, flesh, and the brutal honesty of existence. 

But consider the chaplain's offer more carefully. He comes with grace—unconditional, unearned, given freely. He does not ask Meursault to believe first; he simply offers redemption. Yet Meursault rejects it not out of pride but out of a kind of rigorous honesty. He will not accept comfort he does not feel. He will not pretend that death is anything other than the end, or that suffering has cosmic meaning, or that God cares about his individual soul. In this refusal, Meursault is almost more rigorous about authenticity than even the chaplain is. 

Yet there is a tragic cost to this authenticity. Meursault's rejection of grace is also a rejection of the possibility that something could exist *beyond* his own sensation and understanding. He is locked in the prison of his own sensory experience, unable to imagine that reality might transcend what he can feel or see. The chaplain's offer of grace requires faith in something beyond the senses, a leap into meaning-making that Meursault will not and cannot make. Biblically speaking, this refusal is not strength but a kind of damnation—not punishment from God, but self-imposed exile from the possibility of transcendence itself. 

His anger at the chaplain is the most alive he has ever been. In that outburst, he discovers something like recognition, if not meaning. The universe is indifferent, and the only victory left to him is accepting that indifference without illusion. 

Yet in the novel's closing lines, something shifts. Meursault does not seek salvation. He does not hope for reprieve. He hopes only for a crowd that will greet him with "howls of hate." Why? Because hatred means he *matters*. Even their hatred confirms his existence. He has spent the entire novel unable to connect with anyone, unable to love or be loved meaningfully. But hatred? Hatred recognizes you. It says: *you exist, and your existence disturbs me*. In the end, Meursault craves the one form of connection left to him: being *hated*. It is profoundly lonely, perhaps the loneliest conclusion in all of literature. It suggests that even total alienation, even the prospect of death itself, is preferable to the non-existence of being truly unseen. 

Thus Part II closes not with redemption but with clarity—a clarity as cold as starlight, as bright as the sun that once pressed upon him at the beach. Meursault accepts his death not as punishment but as the final confirmation that he has always existed in a world indifferent to his existence. And perhaps, in accepting that indifference, he finally finds a truth that the rest of us spend our lives avoiding: that meaning is not given to us by the universe, that grace is offered but can be refused, and that the alternative to faith is not wisdom but a beautiful, terrible, unbreakable loneliness. 

 

Reading Meursault: A Reflection on Part I of The Stranger

 

An Essay 

Albert Camus' The Stranger unfolds its first part with a quiet unease, a kind of emotional static humming beneath the surface of every scene. Reading Meursault is like watching someone move through life with wide-open eyes but a dimmed interior world; he notices every detail yet declines to assign it meaning. This paradox — hyper-awareness paired with emotional flatness — forms the strange pulse that drives Part I. 

What unsettled me most is how Meursault perceives events as neutral facts rather than moments demanding emotional response. His mother's death, for instance, is narrated with an almost clinical detachment. He observes the heat on the bus, the brightness of the funeral-home lights, the crunch of the gravel underfoot — and yet grief remains conspicuously absent. He is troubled less by loss and more by the sun's glare. And when he learns that his mother requested a religious burial despite not being very devout, his reaction is not sentimental curiosity but simple surprise: another fact added to the day's catalogue of impressions. 

The funeral wake scene is one with many quiet layers, especially the old friend who cried mechanically throughout the evening. Meursault does not judge him, nor does he feel moved; he merely notes the man's repeated sobbing, the old women in their black shawls, their wheezing breaths, the odd rhythm of bodies expected to perform grief. This moment foreshadows something essential: society judges emotional display, not emotional truth. Meursault's failure to perform grief is treated as a deeper sin than any action he takes later in the novel. 

When he returns to work the next day, he remarks that "nothing had changed." His mother's death leaves no impact on routine, no ripple in the mechanical functioning of the world. This indifference — both his own and the world's is central to Camus' vision of the Absurd: life does not pause for your pain. 

The introduction of Salamano and his dog shifts the narrative tone from sterile detachment to something bleaker, almost grotesque. Salamano abuses his mangy dog daily, cursing and beating it, and yet when the dog runs away, he is shattered. Here, Camus juxtaposes a toxic affection with Meursault's emotional neutrality. Salamano's relationship with his dog, though violent, is emotionally charged; Meursault's relationship with the world, by contrast, is devoid of narrative meaning. It is telling that Meursault is quietly compassionate towards Salamano, offering him advice and listening without judgment. His kindness is genuine, even if understated — he simply refuses to ritualize emotion in the way society expects. 

Raymond's introduction adds another dimension to Meursault's moral universe. When Raymond asks him to write a manipulative, degrading letter intended to lure his mistress into a trap, Meursault agrees effortlessly. Not out of camaraderie or cruelty, but because — to him — it is easy, convenient, and he sees no reason to refuse. This absence of moral language is unsettling. Meursault does not condemn Raymond, nor does he condone him; he merely helps, as though the entire situation is another fact, another small request in the quiet drift of daily life. His testimony later on further illustrates this passivity: he supports Raymond in the police station not out of loyalty, but because he simply tells the truth as he saw it, unaffected by the implications. 

Marie's persistent questions about love highlight this emotional divide even more sharply. To Marie, love is a meaningful word, a bond, a direction. To Meursault, "love" is an empty concept — a word divorced from sensation. He enjoys being with her, admires her beauty, delights in their physical intimacy, and is even willing to marry her if she desires it. Yet the core emotional substance that society expects — that Marie expects is absent. He refuses to lie by pretending to feel what he does not. This refusal is not cruelty; it is a harsh, radical honesty. 

But honesty without narrative meaning becomes alienating, even dangerous. 

Everything tightens in Chapter 6, where the story begins to pivot from detached observation to violent consequence. The beach scene at Masson's house is saturated with sensory detail — the heat crushing the sand, the glare of the sun, the shimmering light on the water. Camus makes the environment itself oppressive, almost predatory. When Meursault approaches the Arab — he approaches, not the other way around; it is not out of hatred or intention but out of aimless drift. Raymond's earlier fight creates the context, but Meursault's action feels driven by physical discomfort more than emotional or moral direction. 

The moment the Arab draws his knife, the sun flashes off the blade "like a fiery spear of light." Meursault reacts not to danger, but to the heat, the glare, the physical invasion of light into his body. His description of the killing is not moral but sensorial: the sweat in his eyes, the burning forehead, the sun pressing on the trigger of his consciousness. He fires once, then four more times "into the lifeless body," almost as if trying to silence the sun itself. 

This is where the Absurd enters most vividly: a man kills another man because the sun was too bright. Not through hatred. Not through intention. Not through ideology. But through the collision between meaningless circumstances and an unreflective human being. 

The Theological Blindness of Meursault 

Yet there is something deeper at work here, something more troubling than philosophical detachment. Meursault sees creation with extraordinary clarity — the sun, the sand, the light reflecting off the blade, every sensory detail catalogued with precision. But he refuses to see people as souls, as bearers of the image of God. He observes faces, bodies, voices, but he cannot perceive the sacred within another person. 

In this, Meursault mirrors the beginning of Ecclesiastes, where Qoheleth also sees the repetition, the futility, the vanity of all things. Both men observe creation with unflinching honesty. Both catalog the cycles, the meaninglessness, the indifference of the world. But here, crucially, they diverge. Qoheleth reaches a turning point. He moves from observation to meaning-making: "Fear God. Keep His commandments. Receive what is given." He acknowledges that meaning comes from beyond, that there is a sacred order to existence. 

Meursault never makes this leap. He remains perpetually frozen in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, in the "vanity of vanities," never arriving at the revelation. He sees Marie's beauty but not her soul. He witnesses his mother's death and catalogs the physical details but misses the spiritual weight of loss. He helps Raymond, listens to Salamano, accepts Marie's love — all gestures of connection — but refuses to see the person behind the action. He enjoys cigarettes, physical intimacy, the warmth of the sun, but assigns no value beyond sensation. He does not ask "what is more in store?" He remains locked in the merely physical. 

This is not cruelty. This is spiritual blindness. He has eyes but does not see. He has ears but does not hear. His hyper-awareness of creation is shadowed by an absolute inability to encounter the sacred in another human being — which, biblically, is the gateway to all meaning. 

Meursault notices everything yet interprets nothing. He lives without motives, without emotional scripts, without the social vocabulary that normally guides human behavior. This neutrality — this refusal to pretend — becomes spiritually dangerous. His honesty isolates him. His passivity allows others' actions to dictate his life. And his refusal to assign meaning to events, to acknowledge the personhood of others, becomes the very thing society will condemn. 

Part I of The Stranger ends not with a climax but with a realization: Meursault has drifted into tragedy not through wickedness but through indifference. He is an outsider not because he hates society but because he will not play its game. And in a world that demands performance — grief, love, remorse, the acknowledgment of the sacred in another person; Meursault stands naked in his literalness, spiritually unable to see what he is looking at. 

What lingers after finishing Part I is a feeling of unease, fascination, and philosophical tension. The novel doesn't tell us whether Meursault is innocent or monstrous; it asks why society requires certain emotional performances to judge guilt at all. But more profoundly, it asks: what happens when a person can see everything but understand nothing? What happens when someone refuses the leap from observation to meaning, from creation to Creator, from things to persons? 

Meursault is stuck in the observation without the revelation. He sees as clearly as Qoheleth but fails to reach the conclusion of the latter — that meaning is given from beyond, that there is purpose in the breaking; that grace moves even here. And in that failure lies the deepest alienation of all: not from society, but from the sacred.