The Strain of Being Normal
My friend Jose Maliekal sends me a couple of messages every morning. I guess that’s more a friendly gesture than a sacerdotal duty. Given my waywardness that age has not mellowed nor custom staled, the latter possibility is not tangential, particularly because Maliekal is a Catholic priest. Anyway, I find many of those messages quite stimulating. One of the messages this morning was a quote from my beloved Albert Camus: "Nobody realises that some people expend tremendous energy to be normal." I save much energy by keeping away from human society generally. But as a young man, I did suffer much on this account. The suffering owed itself to the simple truth that I was not aware of my own narcissism and affiliated vices (virtues, if you are the prime minister of your country or hold some such high position) in those days. Every society has an invisible script. It tells us how to behave, what to desire, when to speak, how much to feel, and when to flee. ‘Normal’ is the si...
