The divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits. This hell of the present is his Kingdom at last.
All problems recover their sharp edge.
The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual existence. The sole thought that is not mendacious is therefore a sterile thought. We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible. There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself as both short-lived and exceptional. Above all, of course, it is drawing all the inferences from that painful independence.