The object of power is power. The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.