"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 lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That strange scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us alone."
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
