Absurdist Quotes

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.

The final conclusion of the absurdist protest is, in fact, the rejection of suicide and persistence in that hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silence of the universe.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to an amoeba, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that it has no self-defined shape. It is my absurdist side that an absurdist person will draw out of me, and my seriousness that a serious person will evoke. If someone thinks I am shy, I will probably end up shy, if someone thinks me funny, I am likely to keep cracking jokes.

His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.

He tapped into the Zen of ignorance, the enlightenment of absurdity.

Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come...

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, it the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.

I don't watch reality TV, my reality is tough enough.

The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises.

Personally I always preferred Lipton's.

Are you an evolutionist? I’m an absurdist, ma’am. But let’s suppose evolution is true; what about the monkeys today? Why can’t we see them evolving? Are they still evolving?

Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle...Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been.

Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story. ("Introduction")

Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.

Of course, from an absurdist perspective, all deaths are a punch line: the good news is, you're born; the bad news is, you die. Life is a death sentence.

Waiting was a tragicomedy. There was this whole absurdist, endless, excruciating quality to it. We distract ourselves in a million different ways to delude ourselves into thinking that we're not "waiting", because waiting is unendurable. Waiting has demands. It percolates with fear and potential rejection, and threatens you with despair... There's always a wisp of hope in the hopelessness...

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The ‘hand’ of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, ‘A Comedy in Chapters’, suggests the novel’s affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners.

These were stories to entertain, told for the shape of them, for the sake of them, for the love of a tale. It was all about the stories and the shapes of the stories. Round ones, spirals, perfect arcs, a ninety-degree take-off with a four-bump landing, and one of his, I remember vividly, was an absurdist finger trap.

Consider the perverse logic of Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion that President Obama was deliberately trying to destroy the American economy as some form of “payback” for slavery and racism, or Glenn Beck’s charge that health care reform is really just Barack Obama’s way to obtain reparations for slavery. Both allegations seem the stuff of absurdist and paranoid fantasy, and yet, in an era of white racial anxiety and resentment, they couldn’t be more rational. They serve, almost perfectly, as triggers for our racial angers and insecurities. That black guy is trying to harm us, to take our money and give it to them, to make us hurt the way his people were hurt.

Rums, wie die Fliege

My bones always crack. Sometimes, I like to imagine that one day, my back will split open, and beautiful wings will emerge.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself. In contemplating the results in an act of rebellion we shall have to ask ourselves each time if it remains faithful to its first noble promise or whether it forgets its purpose and plunges into a mire of tyranny and servitude. In Absurdist experience suffering is individual, but from the moment that a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience, as the experience of everyone. Therefore the first step towards a mind overwhelmed by the absurdity of things is to realize that this feeling, this strangeness is shared by all men, and the entire human race suffers from a division between itself and the rest of the world.

Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it's something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.

In his movie The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke depicts a normal middle-class family who, for no apparent reason, one day quit their jobs, destroy everything in their apartment, including all the cash they have just withdrawn from the bank, and commit suicide. The story, according to Haneke, was inspired by a true story of an Austrian middle-class family who committed collective suicide. As Haneke points out in a subsequent interview, the cliché questions that people are tempted to ask when confronted with such a situation are: “did they have some trouble in their marriage?”, or “were they dissatisfied with their jobs?”. Haneke’s point, however, is to discredit such questions; if he wanted to create a Hollywood-style drama, he would have offered clues indicating some such problems that we superficially seek when trying to explain people’s choices. But his point was precisely that the most profound thoughts about whether life is meaningful occur once we have swept aside all the clichés about the pleasure or lack thereof of “love, work, and play” (Thagard), or of “being whooshed up in sports events and being absorbed in the coffee-making craft” (Dreyfus and Kelly). Psychologically, or psychotherapeutically, these are very useful ways of “finding meaning in one’s life”, but philosophically, they are rather ways of how to avoid raising the question, how to insulate oneself from the likelihood that the question of meaning will be raised to oneself. In my view, then, the particular answer to the second question (what is the meaning of life?) is not that important, because whatever answer one offers, even the nihilist or absurdist answer, is many times good enough if the purpose is to get rid of the state of puzzlement. More importantly, however, what matters is that the question itself was raised, and the question is posterior to the more fundamental one of whether there is any meaning at all in life. It is also intuitive that we could judge someone’s life as meaningless if that person has never wondered whether her life, and life in general, is meaningful or not. At the same time, our proposal is, in my opinion, neither elitist, nor parochial in any way; I find it empirically quite plausible that the vast majority of people have actually asked this question or some version of it at least once during their lives, regardless of their social class, wealth, religion, ethnicity, gender, cultural background, or historical period.

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

I’ve claimed—so far sort of vaguely—that what makes televisions hegemony so resistant to critique by the new Fiction of Image is that TV has coopted the distinctive forms of the same cynical, irreverent, ironic, absurdist post-WWII literature that the new Imagists use as touchstones. The fact is that TV’s re-use of postmodern cool has actually evolved as an inspired solution to the keep-Joe-at-once-alienated-from-and-part-of-the-million-eyed-crowd problem. The solution entailed a gradual shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence in the Big Face that TV shows us. This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values. And this wider shift, in its turn, paralleled both the development of the postmodern aesthetic and some deep and serious changes in how Americans chose to view concepts like authority, sincerity, and passion in terms of our willingness to be pleased. Not only are sincerity and passion now “out,” TV-wise, but the very idea of pleasure has been undercut. As Mark C. Miller puts it, contemporary television “no longer solicits our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but—like the ads that subsidize it—actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust it inspires in us.” 24

It seemed, to Franklin, that it was the old Fictional Personae who had it the hardest. He wasn’t sure if it was because of the time that had passed since they had been written, the effect of numerous editions and translations, or maybe just something in the ink that had curdled over time. The older Ficts tended to be a bit over-dramatic, prone to fits of extreme emotion. Whether it be intense anger, tragic drama, or uncontrolled bursts of absurdist humour, it seemed very difficult for them to find something approaching an emotional equilibrium.

And, most ambitiously, Updike dreamed up an absurdist spectacle (not unlike the drama of the blind cripple and the priests) that drew a large and appreciative lunchtime crowd to a street adjacent to the Yard: a fool disguised as an old man driving an ancient jalopy was hit from behind by a car packed with fellow fools; the old man jumped out and swore at the others in Italian, whereupon they poured from their car carrying sledgehammers and crowbars and proceeded to utterly demolish the jalopy—then drove off lickety-split, leaving the ruined vehicle in the road. In addition to the pranks and the motley

If you reject Absolute Truth, as Discordians do, you are thereby claiming that any doxa (opinion, belief ) is as valid as any other doxa, and t hus we enter the absurdist world of non-knowledge, of “ all truths ” = “ all lies ” . There is neither truth nor falsehood, just what people arbitrarily choose to call truth or falsehood at any instant, according to their shifting beliefs, opinions and speculations . This is exactly what the Discordians subscribe to in their demented war against knowledge and truth. Discordians are ignoramuses who oppose and sneer at reason an d logic. They are those who burn down the Tree of Knowledge , without ever having eaten from it . Instead, t hey have devoured the fruit of the Tree of Ignorance.

If you reject Absolute Truth, as Discordians do, you are thereby claiming that any doxa (opinion, belief ) is as valid as any other doxa, and thus we enter the absurdist world of non-knowledge, of “all truths” = “all lies”. There is neither truth nor falsehood, just what people arbitrarily choose to call truth or falsehood at any instant, according to their shifting beliefs, opinions and speculations. This is exactly what the Discordians subscribe to in their demented war against knowledge and truth. Discordians are ignoramuses who oppose and sneer at reason and logic. They are those who burn down the Tree of Knowledge , without ever having eaten from it. Instead, they have devoured the fruit of the Tree of Ignorance.

After the December 2003 parliamentary election, in which Putin’s United Russia took nearly half the seats and the rest were divided among the Communist Party, the absurdist-nationalist and outrageously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, and a new ultranationalist party called Rodina (Motherland) while all remaining liberals and democrats lost their seats, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reported: “The … elections … failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.

When I first started out I wasn’t even really political. I just wanted to do surreal R. Crumb-ish comics. In the early days, I wanted to be as weird as possible. In the late nineties, in alt-weeklies, it seemed like we lived in times that allowed for absurdist humor. That would feel a little more frivolous now. Over time I feel like I have a greater sense of urgency to make a point and to tell the truth. Hopefully in an amusing way. I’m not trying to be as weird as I possibly can. I think I’m trying to make things a little simpler now, and more accessible. (Interview with Comicsbeat)

Let it be known that I have found purpose through my multiverse-conquering thoughts. Through this purpose, I have found joy, happiness and fulfillment. Through this purpose, I have found the strength to defect from the absurdist sect of non-believers, nihilists and proverbial wanderers and march bravely into the future with God, love and laughter in mind.

In the heavy air of a morning that foretells a blazing afternoon, these absurdist dreams hover, like the musk of an animal that passed the house before dawn. Lethargy, she thinks.

Everyone who is at all successful in comedy has had a secret comedy dork life in their adolescence. Whether it's sitcoms or stand-ups, wallowing in the muck of comedy and repeating classic routines and jokes through your teenage years is what gives every aspiring comic or comedic actor the seed of their absurdist imagination that later takes flower.

The political and ethical failures at the heart of so-called internet culture makes tracing its roots uncomfortable. And we mean personally uncomfortable. The two of us were ourselves part of that culture, as were many of our friends and colleagues. We all bear responsibility, and all must face what boyd describes as a “great reckoning” for the toxicity we collectively helped normalize.11 This toxicity wasn’t restricted to our own insular circles. Instead it helped wedge open the Overton window—the norms of acceptable public discourse—just enough for bigots to shimmy through in 2016. Their deluge of hate, falsehood, and conspiracy theory ripped the walls right off. But first came the absurdist, loud, silly fun that flourished a decade before. The pollution cast off by all that fun percolated underground, intensifying with each passing year. It may have emerged unnoticed by many. Ultimately it was felt by all.

A Dead End Job is what happens when the tentacle-arm monkeys living in my brain get filtered into an urban fantasy novel.

What I love about absurdist fiction is that it uses the supernatural, over-the-top circumstances and humor to explain the everyday. A Dead End Job reads playfully enough, but it covertly touches on mental health, corruption of power and the price of redemption. Oh, and it has like… one-thousand fart jokes.

For those whose senses are properly attuned, the most insignificant events—a woman who delays, a dog who sniffs at a wall—result in something so ineffable … it's as if a hidden universe of accumulated coincidences and circumstances had ordained it—so that even in the presence of so slight a spectacle as that of two flies alighting on a bald head, one would have the impermeability of a crocodile not to experience a veritable paroxysm of admiration.

he found himself overwhelmed by yet another absurdist juxtaposition—one moment about to be murdered by mutants, five minutes later waiting for water to boil for tea.

Waiting was a tragicomedy. There was this whole absurdist, endless, excruciating quality to it. We distract ourselves in a million different ways to delude ourselves into thinking that we're not "waiting," because waiting is unendurable. Waiting has demands. It percolates with fear and potential rejection, and threatens you with despair. —Olivia Michelle Sumner

The awareness of mortality casts a bittersweet shadow over the vibrancy of life and love. We exist in a state of impermanence, where beauty fades and connection dissolves. Yet, it is precisely this impermanence that imbues life with its preciousness and love with its urgency. In the face of oblivion, love becomes a defiant act, a bridge we build across the chasm of the ephemeral, a testament to the enduring power of connection in a fleeting existence." The quote's appreciation for love in the face of life's fleeting nature echoes Epicurean ideals. This emphasizes the existentialist concept of living in a finite world and the absurdist notion of creating meaning in the face of nothingness. It highlights love as a way to transcend the impermanence of life and forge a connection that defies the inevitable. The concept of finding meaning and beauty in a world wracked by impermanence aligns closely with the philosophy of Epicurus. Epicureanism emphasizes living a virtuous and pleasure-filled life while minimizing pain. Though often misinterpreted as mere hedonism, Epicurus also stressed the importance of intellectual pursuits, close friendships, and facing mortality with courage. Unfortunately, Epicurus himself didn't write any essays or novels in the traditional sense. Most of his teachings were delivered in letters and discourses to his students and followers. These were later compiled by others, most notably Hermarchus, who helped establish Epicurean philosophy. The core tenets of Epicureanism are scattered throughout various ancient texts, including: *Principal Doctrines: A summary of Epicurus' core beliefs, likely compiled by Hermarchus. *Letter to Menoeceus: A letter outlining the path to happiness through a measured approach to pleasure and freedom from fear. *Vatican Sayings: A collection of sayings and aphorisms attributed to Epicurus. These texts, along with Diogenes Laërtius' Lives and Sayings of the Philosophers, which includes biographical details about Epicurus, provide the best understanding of his philosophy. Love is but an 'Ephemeral Embrace'. Life explodes into a vibrant party, a kaleidoscope of moments that dims as the sun dips below the horizon. The people we adore, the bonds we forge, all tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that nothing lasts forever. But it's this very impermanence that makes everything precious, urging us to savor the here and now. Imagine Epicurus nudging us and saying, "True pleasure isn't a fleeting high, it's the joy of sharing good times with the people you love." Even knowing things end, we can create a life brimming with love's connections. Love becomes an act of creation, weaving threads of shared joy into a tapestry of memories. Think of your heart as a garden. Love tells you to tend it with care, for it's the source of connection with others. In a world of constant change, love compels us to nurture our inner essence and share it with someone special. Love transcends impermanence by fostering a deep connection that enriches who we are at our core. Loss is as natural as breathing. But love says this: "Let life unfold, with all its happy moments and tearful goodbyes. Only then can you understand the profound beauty of impermanence." Love allows us to experience the full spectrum of life's emotions, embracing the present while accepting impermanence. It grants depth and meaning to our fleeting existence. Even knowing everything ends, love compels us to build a haven, a space where hearts connect. It's a testament to the enduring power of human connection in a world in flux. So let's love fiercely, vibrantly, because in the face of our impermanence, love erects a bridge to something that transcends the temporary.

The awareness of mortality casts a bittersweet shadow over the vibrancy of life and love. We exist in a state of impermanence, where beauty fades and connection dissolves. Yet, it is precisely this impermanence that imbues life with its preciousness and love with its urgency. In the face of oblivion, love becomes a defiant act, a bridge we build across the chasm of the ephemeral, a testament to the enduring power of connection in a fleeting existence. (*This emphasizes the existentialist concept of living in a finite world and the absurdist notion of creating meaning in the face of nothingness. It highlights love as a way to transcend the impermanence of life and forge a connection that defies the inevitable.*)

Catch-22, Joseph Heller sought ‘to dramatize the insanity of war and the stresses that drove people to madness by writing his very serious story using all of the tools of absurdist comedy

Writing destroys the pleasure of reading for all serious writers, by serious I mean those whose foremost topics are sex and death. Never again can you read without stopping to take note of peculiar adjectives and curious turns of phrase. To write well is to steal well. Perhaps this is why I excel at the craft. I was a thief before taking up the martyrdom of the pen. One takes these notes, scrawled on receipts and napkins, places them in front of him like a child with its toys, and constructs the sublime world of imagination.

The rich believe that their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations, and that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.

Al-e-Ahmad’s invocation of existentialist and absurdist themes in the context of Tehran’s slums underlined a shared predicament. Following Hedayat, he spoke of a universal human condition in a world closely knit together by commerce and technology – what Arendt called the state of ‘negative solidarity’. Yet since he wrote, the emotional and intellectual realities signified by the words ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ have come to be seen as fundamentally different and opposed.

We are searching for Go.

The rise of the theater of the absurd, it has been argued, "seems to mirror the change in the predominant form of mental disorders which has been observed and described since World War II by an ever-increasing number of psychiatrists. " Whereas the "classical" drama of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Ibsen turned on conflicts associated with classical neuroses, the absurdist theater of Albee, Beckett, loncsco, and Genet centers on the emptiness, isolation, loneliness, and despair experienced by the borderline personality. The affinity between the theater of the absurd and the borderline's "fear of close relationships, " "attendant feelings of helplessness, loss, and rage," "fear of destructive impulses, " and "fixation to early omnipotence" inheres not only in the content of these plays but-more to the point of the present discussion-in their form. The contemporary playwright abandons the effort to portray coherent and generally recognized truths and presents the poet's personal intuition of truth. The characteristic devaluation of language, vagueness as to time and place, sparse scenery, and lack of plot development evoke the barren world of the borderline, his lack of faith in the growth or development of object relations, his "often stated remark that words do not matter, only action is important," and above all his belief that the world consists of illusions. "Instead of the neurotic character with well-structured conflicts centering around forbidden sex, authority, or dependence and independence within a family setting, we see characters filled with uncertainty about what is real." This uncertainty now invades every form of art and crystallizes in an imagery of the absurd that reenters daily life and encourages a theatrical approach to existence, a kind of absurdist theater of the self.

Bulgakov and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. Political debate and ideological constructs for these elites are just so much absurdist theater, a cynical species of public spectacle and mass entertainment. These systems, like our own, are organized kleptocracies.

Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past. —Lily Tomlin; actress, writer, comedienne, absurdist

Alligators like on the banks by the creeping moss/ And use the sinews of their prey to do their daily floss.

This book is absurdist satire. Nothing in the following text is remotely accurate or true. It is merely reheated bathwater bleeding onto the page from a lunatic’s pen. Sickly manifestations birthed from bouts of night terrors and Sutter Home minis. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents either are the products of the author’s unwell imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Create nothing. Consume Everything.

In such an endeavor it is not enough to say that history unfolds by processes too complex for reductionistic analysis. That is the white flag of the secular intellectual, the lazy modernist equivalent of The Will of God. On the other hand, it is too early to speak seriously of ultimate goals, such as perfect green-belted cities and robot expeditions to the nearest stars. It is enough to get Homo sapiens settled down and happy before we wreck the planet. A great deal of serious thinking is needed to navigate the decades immediately ahead. We are gaining in our ability to identify options in the political economy most likely to be ruinous. We have begun to probe the foundations of human nature, revealing what people intrinsically most need, and why. We are entering a new era of existentialism, not the old absurdist existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre, giving complete autonomy to the individual, but the concept that only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible. In the course of all of it we are learning the fundamental principle that ethics is everything. Human social existence, unlike animal sociality, is based on the genetic propensity to form long-term contracts that evolve by culture into moral precepts and law. The rules of contract formation were not given to humanity from above, nor did they emerge randomly in the mechanics of the brain. They evolved over tens or hundreds of millennia because they conferred upon the genes prescribing them survival and the opportunity to be represented in future generations. We are not errant children who occasionally sin by disobeying instructions from outside our species. We are adults who have discovered which covenants are necessary for survival, and we have accepted the necessity of securing them by sacred oath. The search for consilience might seem at first to imprison creativity. The opposite is true. A united system of knowledge is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality. It provides a clear map of what is known, and it frames the most productive questions for future inquiry. Historians of science often observe that asking the right question is more important than producing the right answer. The right answer to a trivial question is also trivial, but the right question, even when insoluble in exact form, is a guide to major discovery. And so it will ever be in the future excursions of science and imaginative flights of the arts.

If music without words can have “characters,” then Shostakovich’s characters are like those in the absurdist stories of his Leningrad writer friends: broad and bizarre and almost cartoonish at times, full of vivid eccentricities.

The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe.

But absurdist tapeworms and Antoinette’s fever are ills from which, in the nature of the case, Christians are immune, except for occasional spells of derangement when the power of temptation presses their minds out of shape—and these, by God’s mercy, do not last.

Absurdism: The concept that we cannot reconcile our desire to find a meaning of life with the fact that it is rationally impossible to do so. Also, various philosophers’ ideas on how to lead an absurdist life. Some people who embrace the absurdist outlook find it hilarious in a bittersweet sort of way.