Albert Camus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The absurd is not a property of the world, and it is not a property of the mind. It lives between them, in the confrontation itself.1 Consider the simplest cases: a man who attacks machine guns with a sword, a verdict that contradicts the facts, a marriage between two people who have nothing to say to each other. In each instance, what we call absurd arises from the distance between two terms — an intention and a reality, a claim and what the evidence demands.1
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.1 What are the two terms, in the deepest case? On one side: the human mind's hunger for clarity, for unity, for a world that answers back when questioned. On the other: a world that offers only silence, chaos, and what I once called divine equivalence — which is to say, no equivalence at all, just the brute fact of things as they are.2
The absurd is the name for that collision. It is not a conclusion one reaches; it is a feeling that bursts from the comparison, and once felt, it cannot be unfelt. This is why I insisted, in The Myth of Sisyphus — an extended essay on whether life is worth living in the absence of any given meaning — that the absurd is not in man and not in the world, but in their presence together.1
Remove either term and the absurd dissolves. Deny the mind's hunger for unity and you have a kind of animal contentment. Deny the world's silence and you have religion, or ideology, or some other leap past the evidence. Both moves are evasions. The integrity of the position requires staying on the crest, between the two, without flinching.2 Some have taken this as a philosophy of despair.
It is not, and I have said so plainly: there is no total nihilism.3 The moment you say that everything is nonsense, you have said something meaningful. The moment you choose not to die of hunger, you have acknowledged that life carries at least a relative value. Literature of despair is a contradiction in terms — because if he speaks, if he reasons, above all if he writes, the brother reaches out his hand.3
What the absurd demands, then, is not despair and not consolation. It demands that we live and think with the dislocation intact — not resolving it, not suppressing one of its terms, but deriving from it whatever rules of conduct a lucid man can honestly derive.2 That is the only question that ever seriously interested me: not whether the absurd is real, but what follows from it, for a life, for an ethics, for the way one gets through a morning.
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 10
It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together... It was a matter of living and thinking with those dislocations, of knowing whether one had to accept or refuse.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 17
there is likewise no total nihilism. The moment you say that everything is nonsense you express something meaningful... literature of despair is a contradiction in terms.Lyrical and Critical Essays, pp. 171–173