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I was an antsy young teen when I noticed my student friend Anne’s green sweater.

Over her left side there was an inscription on it: “ours the Task Eternal.�� It showed she was a member of Canadian Girls in Training - a Christian body, with a worldwide membership of teen girls devoted to selfless work for others.

Coincidentally. Sisyphus�� task in the Greek myth of the Hell of the Underworld is likewise eternal. But it is futile, Camus infers, insofar as he has not understood that he, Sisyphus, must always devote this work for his fellow inmates�� betterment.

To CGIT members, that work is now Heaven; to Sisyphus it is Hell. For Sisyphus misunderstands Eternity. And he has not even STARTED to consciously expiate his crimes.

For Camus, consciously selfless expiation is everything. The Game’s not over. No, it’s always BEGINNING ANEW. Paradise is always possible.

When I picked up this beloved old book this morning, after awakening from a painfully fitful sleep, the words in it seemed to be my own.

They are all that clearly familiar to me, after so many years away from them.

So it goes with life.

As we approach the years of our old age, the routine of our life falls into place without our even trying - if we have been paying attention to it.

That’s because the way we now live our life is something obvious, like the habits of a dear old friend. There are few surprises. Things are lucid.

We have become, as Auden says so well, like the etched strata of a limestone cliff - for we have become our Faults, friendly qualities with which we are now as familiar as with the back of our hand.

So it is with that apparition which Camus here calls the worm in our heart. For that is the very heart of the evil in our world.

The worm in the heart is self-interest. It suspends our disbelief in our personal stories. We start believing in a self who has continuity and is progressing over time. Towards what?

Nothing, really - but our pleasure in our life stories persuade us that they’re true. But Camus is saying that to see the truth, we have to come to grips with emptiness and face the end of our stories.

We have to wake up to a life emptied of frills and diversions. That is his counter-attack on the worm’s self-aggrandizing illusions.

Others have undertaken that same attack on their egos. Like in Ryan Holiday’s The Ego is the Enemy.

And I think of Bach, and his dour middle period of penitential music. I believe he successfully eliminated his Daemon of pride in his Pietist practises, as was reflected in this beautiful, mournful music.

How we choose the inevitable flight from that too-lucid apparition will decide our destiny. After that, our habits become something we can modify.

When I was a very young teen in the throes of coming of age, I - in my fear - chose the framework of a Christian mindset with which to judge my urges, and I’m glad I did. It has served me very ably.

Unfortunately, my young mind was too predisposed to dreaming, to interpret this mindset as anything other than mystical and dream-like.

As Gérard de Nerval sang so well:

J’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Acheron
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphee
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la fée.

In fact, it is the polar opposite of the dreamily affective, this conscious wide-awake awareness: for it’s intensely practical.

It is the very beginning of an annulment of emotional involvement in our stories, eventually resulting in a more natural and real love.

My sudden realization that I had always had a condition known as Asperger’s syndrome helped enormously here.

I can verify that fact now, in light of the habitual ease of my generally virtuous habits being slightly autistic in nature - however jarringly at odds with reality they may seem to my contemporaries.

My insight, and my meds, trimmed the accumulated fat from that goodness, thank heaven! And the love of my wife and friends helped a lot too.

All well and good so far. But there’s a problem here.

For though the Framework of my thoughts was useful and viable, my habitual responses to that worm in the heart had not been that.

I always chose A Dark FLIGHT from that Worm - Camus says we all do - when I could have chosen a Lucid Stand to be Perfectly Conscious of it. Avoidance is built into our modern way of life.

For if we answer the Lucidity of the Worm with the Lucidity of Conscious Awareness, we will still, like the rest of the human race, veer in our unguarded moments towards weakness and disaster.

But here’s the thing: by lucid awareness of the worm’s nonbeing we can make the whole scenario transparent to our own habitual subconscious thinking.

As Camus does by making the monsters of nothingness dissolve.

And what happens when the Worm is seen through?

Our life gains a New Quality: Peace.

THAT is what happens when, as Eliot says, “the Kingfisher’s wing answers Light to Light, and is Silent.��

Did you get that?

The King shines the Light of Heaven on our lucid struggle with a Very Lucid Enemy.

And His Silence thereafter is our Peace...

And a Sign of His Blessing:

For, as the psalmist says, “Ce goût du néant est (seulement) le goût du mensonge!��

And That’s how our old age can become transparent -

With a sense of humdrum tranquility.

And a return to daytime normalcy after the midnight nightmares of the worm.