At that moment he read on the tomb the date of his father’s birth. Then
he read the two dates, “1885-1914,” and automatically did the
arithmetic: twenty-nine years. Suddenly he was struck by an idea that
shook his very being. He was forty years old. The man buried under that
slab, who had been his father, was younger than he. And the wave of
tenderness and pity that at once filled his heart was not the stirring
of the soul that leads the son to the memory of the vanished father, but
the overwhelming compassion that a grown man feels for an unjustly
murdered child – something here was not in the natural order and, in
truth, there was no order but only madness and chaos when the son was
older than the father.
Albert Camus, « The First Man »
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