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Of whom and of what indeed can I say: ‘I know that!’
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world
I can touch and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge
and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which
I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarise it, it is nothing but
water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects
it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to
it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardour or these silences, this
nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart
which is mine will for ever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty
I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance,
the gap will never be filled. For ever I shall be a stranger to myself…
And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I
feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars 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. You describe it to me and you teach
me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge
I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases.
At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicoloured universe
can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to
an electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you
tell me of an invisible planetary system in which the electrons gravitate
around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realise
then that you have ben reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the
time to become indignant ? You have already changed theories. So that
science was to teach me everything and ends up in hypothesis, that lucidity
founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What
need had I of so many efforts ? The soft lines of these hills and the
hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned
to my beginning. I realise that if through science I can seize phenomena
and enumerate them, I cannot for all that apprehend the world. Were I
to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know anymore.
And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that
teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but are not sure.
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that
negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which
I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite
for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults ? To will is to stir
up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being
that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal
renunciations.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
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