Hermit

A novel by Eugene Ionesco (1909-94). It is often compared to Camus' The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea. The unnamed protagonis, a petit-bourgeois "nowhere man" tells us: I philosophize too much. That's my weakness. If I had been less of a philosopher I would have had a happier life. When one is not a great philosopher, one should not philosophize. And even when they are great they are pessimistic, or their conclusions are impossible to fathom. If only I had known how to put each moment to good use, life would have been beautiful. I had let the stream of life flow past; I had wasted it, not taken advantage of it. ... I hadn't tried very hard, because I felt that it was impossible to know what I wanted to know. Years passed, or seconds. All disappears but the light that had entered into me remained.