The fundamentally true:

"I come at last to death and the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical [meaning inevitable, I suppose] aspect of the event. If time frightens us, that is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterward."

And the dry as desert humor:

"Reflection on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the only problem to interest me: is there a logic to the point of death? I cannot know unless I pursue, without reckless passion, in the sole light of evidence, the reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source. This is what I call an absurd reasoning. Many have begun it. I do not yet know whether or not they kept to it."

Food for thought.

user-inactivated:

On the absurdity of man's situation:

"And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and starts at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -- how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine."

Brilliant way to express in just a handful of simple sentences the crux of an entire philosophy.


posted 3739 days ago