Camus mentions density

Ran across in Camus a discussion that includes observations on density, on the notion of thoughts or a visual modality being dense. Density is a big thing for me.

Some of us experience life as density, as befit with density. Camus assigns discovering visions of density – as part of seeing the absurd, it is an appearance of the absurd. Absurd for him encompasses a philosophical category which sees through, which incurs visions that see through to the real.

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is ‘dense,’ sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us.”

Camus goes on to explain that it is not without beauty, but indeed bereft with beauty, beauty remains even after it is overturned, lies instead in what remains as consequence of its reversal:

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute loses the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. Primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia… The stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us…”

La Chute

Suddenly the word chute opens up for me, french for the fall. Density for me leads back to notion of depths, plunged in a visionary density, one seemingly falls through depths.

La Chute, falling through, at bathymetry of intensities, aroused from traveling through a cosmology of metaphysics, a quest for meaning, amd finding that notions of god, of religion, etc. arrive at themselves via deeply compelled epiphanies, as if walking through a density of wonder, shame, chaos, etc.

The falling through becomes an effort to reach beyond, becomes itself a venture through wilderness of meaning, death, pleasure, hope, love, hate, and fallen desire.

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