 “With the exception of professional rationalists, people today despair of true knowledge” (MS, 18). Camus asserts that the history of human thought is characterized by “its successive regrets and its impotences” (MS, 18), and that “the impossibility of knowledge is established” (MS, 25). When writing more carefully, he claims only to be describing a certain “climate,” but in any case his bedrock assumptions appear again and again: the world is unknowable and life is without meaning. Our efforts to understand them lead nowhere.