What we can learn from “The Adulteress Wife.”

Albert Camus’ depressing short story, “The Adulteress Wife,” tells the story of a woman who is dissatisfied with life.  She finds her husband, with whom she is traveling on a business trip, to be a bore that is more interested in business than marriage.  He is generous and provides for her, but she finds no excitement about life and with him.  She considers herself attractive and is pleased with her body, and is perhaps a little excited by the attention she receives from a man in uniform, although she does not find him attractive.  Her domestic life, centered around her home above their shop, is her preferred place, but even that is portrayed in terms that sets one in mind of a prison, not a home.

The life in which this poor woman finds herself is symbolized in the dry, cold, gray, dusty world in which they travel.  In the evening, the couple retires to a cold room and Janine tries to find comfort with her husband, but her sleeping husband provides no spark of warmth.  Cold, inside and out, Janine gets up in the night and goes to the city walls she had explored earlier that evening with her husband.  There in the desert night the beauty of the star-crowded sky provides for her some sense of a spark of life.  But as she stands there, even that fades.  Returning to her room, her crying awakes her husband.  He asks, “What is the matter?”  She replies, “Nothing.  Nothing is the matter, Darling.”

We might be tempted to imagine that this is about the lack of communication between a husband and a wife.  But it is much deeper than that. 

The ancient Greek world was haunted by the concept of “phtheirō”.  It means corruption, as translated in 2 Peter 1.4.  But it comes from the idea of “to pine” or “to waste away.”  With no hope in a life after death, only the gray, shadowy places of Hades, the Greek thinkers lived under the cloud of “phtheiro.”  It was the senselessness and transitory nature of life that bothered them.  The problem was nothing or the nothingness that life offers; if this life is all there is. 

In Jesus, we escape the pining away, the wasting away, and the corruption of life.  In Him, we have an out from the nothingness, which haunts a godless world.  We desperately attempt to avoid the nothingness of life.  We try to find something that will give us meaning in the midst of the meaninglessness.  We assign great importance to things that are truly nothing.   We elevate pleasant pastimes to priorities.  We act as if the events captured by paparazzi make a difference.  We add 100 cable channels to our TV, so that every passing fancy can be explored.  We fill every moment with some sort of stimulus or depressant in a desperate effort to hide from ourselves that all is nothing.  All life is pointless, then we die; unless, we know Jesus. 

“Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God. The best invitation we ever received!  We were also given absolutely terrific promises to pass on to you—your tickets to participation in the life of God after you turned your back on a world corrupted by lust.”  2 Peter 1:3-4 The Message

Janine was right; nothingness is the problem.  If you listen, you can hear the heart cry of, “Nothing!” in our world.  It is a heart cry for Jesus, the only solution to nothingness.