I learn that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the seep of days. These paltry and essential belongings, these relative truths are the only ones to stir me. As for the others, the “ideal” truths, I have not enough soul to understand them. Not that one must be an animal, but I find no meaning in the happiness of angels. I know simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after my death? I am not expressing here the creature’s satisfaction with his condition. It is quite a different matter. It is not always easy to be a man, still less to be a pure man….There are words I have never really understood, such as “sin.” For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. . . And again that scent hallows the union of man and earth and awakens in us the only really virile love in this world: ephemeral and noble.
- Albert Camus from Summer In Algiers (1936)
