from: Remy de Gourmont

"The true interest of life comes from its obscurity; it is incomprehensible, illogical and uncertain, and that is why the most fastidious love it with a gloomy passion. If the solution of the enigma was whispered in our ear at the age of reason, should we be able to go on living? Having no more uncertainty, we should have no more hope. The philosophers' phrase, "I live out of curiosity", is applicable to all lives. Certainty is a stae of annihilation. The notion of paradise is so near to that of Nirvana that Christian hapiness and Hindoo hapiness can be defined philosophically by the same word; both contain the idea of repose. All activity has uncertainty for its principle. Happiness itself, if it is presented under inevitable conditions, ceases to be desired with sufficient force to be happiness. We no longer desire the inevitable; we await it. Can happiness be seperated from the ferment, desire? Yet all men ardently desire certainty; they desire it to a mad extent; they forget all the enjoyment, all the shades, all the charms of the present to hold out their arms and their foreheads towards a cold idol with an empty belly. Perhaps, if the time is favourable, they can thrust their hands into the hole bored out by the multiple contact of blind wills; and then what? Is it certitude to touch a stone, wood, or a wound? Without submitting to views of finality, we may suppose that if certainty is a state of inaction, the mania for certitude on the contrary is a principle of action. Truth is only a statue of shadow, but to reach it man takes a thousand troubles one of which perhaps is fertile. This is only a risky hypothesis, for few human creatures are fitted to utilise an abstract principle as a lever, and that is very fortunate. Every time abstraction has become the guide of humanity, civilization has deviated, has sunk, has despised life to exalt a celestial glow, to adore a star, an idea, a nothing."