“Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.  The revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”

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Heidegger spoke of the world and the earth as different, yet his terms seem to put a positive take on the world-making ability of man. Here Camus wants to focus on the foreignness or absurdity of the earth when we let our sense of earth-world disappear.

“everyone lives as if no one knew (about death)”

Yes, it is necessary to live without this knowledge.  I think of the play “Our Town”.  Someone claims that only poets and saints really suck out the marrow of life.  Perhaps Flannery O’Connor’s stories, such as ”A Good Man is Hard to Find”, suggest that the heinous, nihilistic sinners also sense the truth about life and death.  Perhaps we are still so genetically engaged in the acts that promote living on a personal level, like the simplest of animals–survival–that we fail to think as do the philosophers, saints, poets, and great sinners.

“to understand is to unify”

Camus has been linking these concepts throughout the piece.  I suspect that he wants to undermine both, but he often seems to rely, even at this late date on the unifying values of reason.  While dismantling the assumptions of the rational world, he employs its rules. 

Camus seeks  a truth, or truth itself.  he seeks unity within his agnosticism.  His writing/thinking is a self-contradictory grasp at a unity-truth in which he has ceased to believe.  He undermines his truth of truths by proving the absurd.

The spirit of the absurd is life to religion endangered by the rationalistic-scientific world view.  Flannery speaks of the dissected heart, incomprehensible by the means of science.   She is on a path similar to that of Camus.

“You tell me of an invisible planetary system in which elections gravitate around a nucleus.  You explain this world to me with an image.  I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.”

Camus is locked into the idea of reason as being a rationalist, a posteriori category: the Cartesian split.  His philosophy is trapped within the reactionary forces that Descartes unleashed when he divided mind from brain, soul from body.  Thus far in the writing, he is unable to escape.  Poetic knowledge is all that is possible, but he wants the certainty of scientific knowledge.  Chapter 32 of “Moby Dick” deals much earlier with this question.  What most read as a boring piece of pre-Victorian cataloguing, the true scholar recognizes to be Melville’s attack on the scientific-rationalist world-view.  He is a dark-minded Romantic.  Unlike Camus, Melville is saying that the poetic worldview is primary, the scientific is subservient.

“I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot for all that, apprehend the world.”

Science’s realm is the earth, but the world, which is the construction of man’s mind, cannot be described by the tools of science.  Man cannot be truly comprehended by science.