And then I lost my wallet.

Actually, my wallet was stolen from a gym locker. As I reassembled its contents (driver’s license, credit card, etc.), I had to look up and copy out the Russell quote again. But now, a decade later, though I still responded to the rhetorical swell of the prose, I noticed that Russell had claimed only that the science on which he had laid his firm foundation of despair was “nearly certain.” I noticed that I had no independent knowledge of the scientific basis for his existential claims. And I reflected that, in any case, science itself must surely have moved on in important ways since his day. But then I noticed something else: My Russell romance had not been my only such love affair. I had been rhetorically smitten at least twice before, and both times the words were very like Russell’s.

Though I could read French, I had read barely a dozen or so entire books in that language. Among those few were two that affected me so strongly, I can still recall where I was when I read them, most especially where I was when I read the entrancing passages I might have recalled (but didn’t) when I originally transcribed Russell.

The first passage is the famous conclusion to the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Camus, like Russell, asserts that despair and—going beyond Russell—even suicide are the logical responses to the human condition. But he proceeds to assert that we must rebel against that logic and happily embrace the absurdity of life. The embrace of hope and the refusal of suicide constitute the rock that the mythical Sisyphus, standing in for you and me, must endlessly push to the top of the mountain of existence, knowing that as he reaches the summit—as despair fades and hope nears triumph—the rock will tumble punishingly to the bottom, forcing him to an absurd renewal of his commitment to life and hope.

To him this now lord-less universe appears neither sterile nor futile. Every particle of that rock, every mineral glint from that mountain swathed in night, forms a world unto itself. The struggle toward the peaks is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The second passage that so transfixed me was by a French scientist who was a close personal friend of Camus’s, as I learned only later. This was Jacques Monod, a molecular biologist and, like Camus, a Nobel laureate. In his book Chance and Necessity (1970), he did not just declare that the universe was an accident but went on to explain in mesmerizing detail how the accident might plausibly have happened. If Monod’s account of the initial accident and of its inevitable continuation was correct, what did it say about the human condition? How were we to live? Monod answered that question as follows:

If he is to accept this message in its full meaning, man must finally awaken from his age-old dream to discover his total solitude, his radical strangeness. He knows now that, like a nomad, he stands at the margin of the universe where he must live. A universe deaf to his music, as indifferent to his hopes as to his sufferings—or to his crimes.

We were to live as gypsies, then, looking in from the outside upon a settled universe deaf to the most plaintive strains from our violins.

What to say? In my 20s, I was a sucker for such stuff. Worse, I was painfully slow to notice my own posing. Only after the passage of some time and the small, salutary shock of having my wallet stolen did I examine these three professions of secular faith and realize, with an inward blush, that what I had wanted was simply closure, a way to stop thinking about questions whose answers were beyond my reach. Camus may have earned his existentialism in the French Resistance. Monod must have earned his both there and in his laboratory. I could not, I cannot, do other than honor their memory. But my own identification with them seemed a meretricious, adolescent borrowing. It was the secular equivalent of what the German theologian and martyr of the German Resistance Dietrich Bonhoeffer had scorned as “cheap grace.” I felt a little ashamed of myself.