Title: I Am Alive and You Are Dead

Author: Kate Camp

In: Sport 29: Spring 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 2002

Part of: Sport

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The little-ease

Chaos turned to order is a comfort. Hence the popularity of rationalising devices from the palm pilot to the murder mystery. I think it is this, more than anything, that draws me to read about crime. In a life where the little grey cells can so rarely tie up all the loose ends, there is something very reassuring about reaching a final conclusion. And there is also something superstitiously protective about encountering terror at one remove, as if by doing so we can immunise ourselves, and strengthen our resistance.

It is not surprising then that, after thinking about the case of Jean-Claude Romand for these months, the concept I keep coming back to in conclusion is comfort. The comfort of one who may close the book and turn away from the page, of one who has been, to paraphrase Camus, neither victim nor executioner.¹⁹

And the comfort of one who lives a good life, for, if we accept the banality of evil—and we so readily accept it that the phrase is itself page 221 banal—we must surely also accept the banality, the commonplace nature, the ordinariness of good.

To walk to our car in the morning and drive to a real office; to lie in bed with a partner from whom we fear no discovery; to have nothing to hide but our weakness and folly: these are the hallmarks of our virtue, our humanity, the tedious daily heroism of simply living as authentic a life as possible.

Near the end of The Fall Jean-Baptiste Clamence describes a medieval punishment for criminals:

To be sure, you are not familiar with that dungeon cell that was called the little-ease in the Middle Ages. More often than not, one was forgotten there for life. That cell was distinguished from others by ingenious dimensions. It was not high enough to stand up in nor yet wide enough to lie down in. One had to take on an awkward manner and live on the diagonal; sleep was a collapse and waking a squatting. Mon cher, there was genius—and I am weighting my words—in that so simple invention. Every day through the unchanging constraint that stiffened his body, the condemned man learned that he was guilty and that innocence consists in stretching joyously.²⁰

Our unnoticed luxury, our reward for having the courage to travel life's awkward landscapes, our prize for simply being ourselves, then, is that of stretching to our full height. And that is the great ease and comfort I take as I turn away from the page towards the blank unwritten sheets of a newly-made bed.