Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in

He knows simply that in that alert awareness there is no further place for hope.

And those inspired automata, Kafka’s characters, provide us with a precise image of what we should be if we were deprived of our distractions*2 and utterly consigned to the humiliations of the divine.

of those steps is religious in essence;

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.

Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.

Such men know to begin with, and then their whole effort is to examine, to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which they have just landed. But first they must know. For the absurd discovery coincides with a pause in which future passions are prepared and justified. Even men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not

The intoxication of the irrational and the vocation of rapture turn a lucid mind away from the absurd.