Art can never be so well
served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated
proceedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work
as black is to white. To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture
in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s
work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this
has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the
difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these
two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and
magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He
must give the void its colors.