Selv barn forstår at hvis man stiller spørsmålet "Hvorfor det?" om et hvilket som helst tema og deretter gjentar spørsmålet rekursivt, så ender undersøkelsen uunngåelig i det absurde. Man kommer alltid til et punkt hvor det ikke lenger finnes svar, eller man tvinges til å slutte en sirkel. I dagliglivet er vi kanskje best tjent med å la slike spørsmål ligge, men det finnes de av oss som aldri helt klarer å legge fra seg disse problemene. Hvordan kan man leve uten mening?
Mange av oss baserer vårt verdensbilde på vitenskap, men også vitenskapen har sine grenser. Vi lar oss styre av følelser som vi ikke kan forklare, men vi tror likevel vi er frie. Vi forsøker å forklare verden, men vi har ingen faste referanser. Jeg har aldri før lest noen som har formulert dette så vondt og vakkert som Albert Camus gjør i The Myth Of Sisyphus:
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 likewise I 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 summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. [..] This very heart which is mine will forever 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. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. [..]
And here are 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 multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good an I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. [..]
[Y]ou give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that 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?
Å lese Camus er som å bli dyttet nærmere og nærmere et stup; en enorm avgrunn som vi vanligvis prøver å unngå å se ned i. Kanskje er vi nødt til å konfrontere vår egen absurde eksistens for virkelig å forstå at vi, tross alt, er lykkelige..