The Fall

Albert Camus
Tr. Justin O'Brien

To achieve notoriety it is enough, after all, to kill one's concierge.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent, cher monsieur. And in my opinion--all right, all right, I'm coming!--that's what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be a joke.

Yes, hell must be like that: streets filled with shop signs and no way of explaining one-self. One is classified once and for all.

An odd epoch, indeed! It's not at all surprising that minds are confused and that one of my friends, an atheist when he was a model husband, got converted when he became an adulterer!

I think perhaps this last quote has my faith wrapped up (entirely?) in it. Righteousness, not being ours, is not the reason we believe. We believe because at some point we are all adulterers; we believe because we are all found guilty before the courts; we believe that no matter how we act, there is something more going on.
Camus purpose in The Fall is to lay out the general guilt of our species. I don't know that it is from a particularly Christian stand point or a even from a religious stand point, but he surely does give you the eerie feeling of tingling hairs on the back of your neck: haven't we all heard a splash in the water and known of the evil and hoped that it wouldn't confront us so we could look elsewhere? Why else would we have such fervor in our prosecution of "criminals" who have not actually harmed us at all? We say that our sense of justice is outraged or that we are angered by the dreadfulness or evil of the act, but I have a feeling we like to pick out the clear cases of evil for ourselves and pin them down and label them and say Ha! Look! We've got it figured out! Here is what evil is! Here is what is wrong with the world! And we are not that.
But we are.
Our righteous anger, the volume of our voices, the stretching of screaming vocal chords all point an incriminating finger into our own lives. We're looking to the newspapers so we don't have to hear that splash echoing in the back of our minds. That splash kills us.