Reasonable Doubt

      Another way of looking at it: you must be simple, truthful, not go in for literary declamations — accept and commit yourself. But we do nothing else.
     If you are convinced of your despair, you must either act as if you did hope after all — or kill yourself. Suffering gives no rights.

    An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."
     I prefer to keep my eyes open.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, May 1936, p. 28.

     Once he has reached the absurd and tries to live accordingly, a man always perceives that consciousness is the hardest thing in the world to maintain. Circumstances are almost always against it. He must live his lucidity in a world where dispersion is the rule.
     So he perceives that the real problem, even without God, is the problem of psychological unity (the only problem really raised by the operation of the absurd is that of metaphysical unity of the world and the mind) and inner peace. He also perceives that such peace is not possible without a discipline difficult to reconcile with the world. That's where the problem lies. It must indeed be reconciled with the world. It is a matter of achieving a rule of conduct in secular life.
     The great obstacle is his past life (profession — marriage — previous opinions, etc.). What has already taken place. Not to elude any of the elements of this problem.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, pp. 10-11.

     Modern intelligence is in utter confusion. Knowledge has become so diffuse that the world and the mind have lost all point of reference. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. But the most amazing things are the admonitions to "turn backward." [an allusion to speeches/writings of the Vichy period] Return to the Middle Ages, to primitive mentality, to the soil, to religion, to the arsenal of worn-out solutions. To grant a shadow of efficacy to those panaceas, we should have to act as if our acquired knowledge had ceased to exist, as if we had learned nothing, and pretend in short to erase what is inerasable. We should have to cancel the contribution of several centuries and the incontrovertible acquisitions of a mind that has finally (in its last step forward) recreated chaos on its own. That is impossible. In order to be cured, we must make our peace with this lucidity, this clairvoyance. We must take into account the glimpses we have suddenly had of our exile. Intelligence is in confusion not because knowledge has changed everything. It is so because it cannot accept that change. It hasn't "got accustomed to the idea." When that does happen, the confusion will disappear. Nothing will remain but the change and the clear knowledge that the mind has of it. There's a whole civilization to be reconstructed.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., pp. 15-16.