…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 multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and 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.
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter, these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.
Isaac Newton marked his alchemical notes with the phrase “hunting the green lion.” In alchemical symbols of this process, the green lion sits in a field, mouth half full of sun, which pours from its jaws like water. “In me,” the green lion says, “all the secrets of the Philosophers are hidden.”
