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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the others among us wanted to show not only the condition of
being in love, adulterous, even social. We wanted to make evident to
the spectators the existential condition of man even in his integrity,
in his totality, in his deepest tragedy, his destiny - that is to say in
the conscience of the absurdity of the world. This is history "told by
an idiot."
In this way we wanted to serve man's knowledge, if one can use
these words, through the most ingrained testimony of our being. I
thought that the theater was in some sense useless but that one could
live with the useless, that one needs the useless: what use are the
vital football games and tennis matches and so many other contests?
It is the useless that one cannot do without. But one can do without
the so-called useless game of art, of contemplation, of prayer. Yes,
art is useless, but its uselessness is indispensable. In the encyclope–
dias of the new China, the word "contemplation," it seems, has been
suppressed . Contemplation is in a sense useless and at the same time
essential, indispensable. People who have lost it and who are not
astonished by their being, by existence, are spiritually infirm. Could
I affirm that in our world art can replace religion? Since I questioned
the utility of art, I could ask myself about the utility of the magnifi–
cent construction of the antique temples. Constructed to receive the
faithful who would come to pray, today they are visited only by
tourists, and no longer by believers, since these religions are dead;
the best among them appreciate and admire the pure construction of
the spirit, since an architectural construction is an idea, a construc–
tion of the spirit, an abstract structure.
I still don't know very well what the word "absurd" means
unless it is the interrogation of the absurd, and I repeat that those
who no longer are astonished that they exist, those who don't ask
questions about being, who find that all is normal, natural now that
the world is rejoining the supernatural, are infirm. I don't know if
one is to feel sorry for them or to rejoice for them. But the wonder–
ment will come; the question of the absurdity of this world cannot
fail to be posed even if there is no possible response. All those who
live in the immediately useful, in routine, in politics are to be pitied,
whereas it is before the incomprehensible that we ought to kneel.
At least one should ask oneself about the existential problems
the ecologists have posed . Soon the atmosphere's ozone may be miss–
ing. This will, for example, be the fault of the politicians, of the
engineers and chemists who construct death engines instead of
