During choir rehearsal this afternoon, we rehearsed a light, rhythmic contemporary piece inspired by the sounds of the Indonesian gamelan. Quite enjoying myself, I was suddenly jarred by the realization that I was singing different pitches than the rest of my section, first soprano. Puzzled, I carefully studied my score.

I'm singing the correct pitches; how is it that all the other first sopranos are simultaneously singing the wrong pitches?

A myriad of thoughts flooded my mind. I considered simply conforming with my peers and singing the wrong pitches, lest they jeer at me with their eyes for sounding different notes, nevermind if they are the correct notes. Yet, the integrity of the piece demands a note-perfect performance. Can one small voice be set apart and become an example, or does it become swallowed by the mass anyway? How difficult it is to sing the right notes while everyone else is humming to a different tune! What made the wrong pitches all the more deceiving was that, in their harmonic syntax, they sounded correct. And, of course, they also sounded beautiful.

In the end, I sung the right notes.

Because we know that what may seem beautiful is inherently flawed unless it is founded on truth.

Our loneliest moment of existence

"Is there another love than that of darkness, a love that would cry aloud in daylight? She didn't know, but she did know that Marcel needed her and that she needed that need, that she lived on it night and day, at night especially -- every night, when he didn't want to be alone, or to age or die...No, he didn't love her; he was merely afraid of what was not she, and she and he should long ago have separated and slept alone until the end. But who can always sleep alone? Some men do, cut off from others by a vocation or misfortune, who go to bed every night in the same bed as death...She called to him with all her heart. After all, she too needed him, his strength, his little eccentricities, and she too was afraid of death."

-- Albert Camus, "The Adulterous Woman", Exile and the Kingdom


Respected Christian philosopher and apologist, Ravi Zacharias spoke precisely of this short story by Camus when I had the privilege of attending his lecture last month. The story describes a woman, married to the same man for twenty-five years, and one night while lying awake next to her husband, impulsively decides to liberate herself from meaninglessness by fulfilling her one obsession, a lifelong sensual fantasy. She slips out of their bedroom, her heart beating madly, and succumbs to desire:

"...with unbearable gentleness, the water of night began to fill Janine, drowned the cold, rose gradually from the hidden core of her being and overflowed in wave after wave, rising up even to her mouth full of moans."

With precaution, she returns to her husband who is still sleeping. He stirs as she quietly climbs into bed, and now woken, her husband gets up for a drink of water. As he is about to get into bed again, he is surprised by what he sees. His wife, sitting up in bed, was sobbing copiously. And she said to him, "It's nothing, dear. It's nothing."

Camus descibes the moment when the One Thing in which we've placed all our hope disappoints us. It is our loneliest moment of existence, when darkness becomes our closest friend. And we live, night and day, in bleak and quiet terror. Alone.


Did you know The Adulterous Woman is one of my favorite short stories?