What Remains Part 2: The Stillness of the Absurd

The scientific worldview had provided a temporary harbor—a way to orient myself after the dissolution of my earlier religious certainties. For a time, it seemed enough to assemble the fragments of our evolutionary past, to map the branches of our family tree, to give faces to our ancient ancestors. The careful measurements and statistical models offered a structure, a methodology, a purpose. They gave shape to my days and meaning to my work. The ship had found its equilibrium.

But stillness, I was learning, is also impermanent—the pause before the next wave hits. And hit it did.

I had spent years trying to make sense of the human condition by looking backward—sculpting ancestors, measuring bone, constructing forms that might somehow clarify what we are. But at a certain point, the trail began to vanish. The further back I reached, the more distant the answers receded. The reconstruction methods revealed more questions than answers. And quietly, I began to sense that the thing I had been chasing—true human connection—might never be found in the past at all. That this search might be absurd.

That word - absurdity - often came to mind during the struggle to reconstruct our ancestors' faces. With each scientific study and subsequent publication—of which I contributed to three—it felt like we were back at the beginning. Or rather, farther from the misty summit we were striving toward. The equations and tissue-depth markers that once seemed like keys to unlock ancient humanity now appeared, in certain moments of clarity, like elaborate pretenses—sophisticated ways of avoiding the simple truth that we cannot fully know these beings who came before. We were reaching across an unbridgeable void, armed with calipers and statistical models, as if measurement alone could resurrect the dead - a calculator telling Lazarus to rise and come forth.

It was around this time that I began to reflect more deeply on the writings of Albert Camus, who had been introduced to me years earlier in college—particularly The Myth of Sisyphus. At the time of my first encounter with his ideas I found them superficially interesting, but I was much more allured by the hopeful vision of understanding the world scientifically offered by other writers and did not spend much time with the weight of existing in a wonder-filled yet uncaring universe. Now that I was years into that hopeful voyage I began to feel and live through what I had only read about years earlier. Upon a second reading of his work I now understood his was a voice that did not promise meaning or comfort, but something much more honest: an acknowledgment of our condition as finite beings in an indifferent world, and the insistence that we live anyway. He called this clash of seemingly opposing realities "the absurd."

For Camus, the absurd is not a theory—it is a confrontation. A lived collision between our hunger for clarity and the apparent silence of the world. And rather than flee from this silence into illusions—of God, of ultimate progress, of some neat narrative arc—we are invited to remain. To stay lucid. To live without appeal.

He begins his work with a stark and troubling claim: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," Camus wrote. "And that is suicide."

He does not mean this rhetorically. He means it with the full weight of lived experience—one that I seemed to share, not only when I first encountered those words, but again years later, when I found myself confronted by the same question: what do I do with a finite life?

It must be noted that this claim assumes a particular kind of worldview: one in which the universe is indifferent to us. The kind of universe that would, with no concern for fairness or narrative, reward a Cuban boy born into poverty with a devoted mother, an adoptive father figure, and a whole network of kind and nurturing people who would support him into a career in the arts—while at the same time allowing a child in Nigeria to die of malaria just days after birth. With that in view, according to Camus, once we truly understand that life has no preordained meaning from on-high, we are left with a choice. Do we continue? Do we find value in the act of living itself? Can we accept the terms of our existence—and still say yes?

In one of his most enduring metaphors, Camus reimagines the ancient myth of Sisyphus. In the original story, Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to an eternity of meaningless labor—rolling a massive boulder up a hill, only to watch it tumble back down each time he nears the top. For the ancient world, it was punishment for defying the divine order. But for Camus, the myth becomes something else entirely: a portrait of the human condition. We live, we labor, we hope—and we die. And yet, Camus insists that even within this futility, there is a kind of freedom. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," he writes—not because the task is noble, but because the man knows it is futile, and still chooses to continue.

This was the shift that began to happen in me—not all at once, but gradually, like a tide receding. I began to let go of the idea that my work could ever fully explain or satisfy my yearning for an answer to what it means to be human. I stopped believing that clarity would arrive if I just measured enough tissue depths or faithfully reconstructed enough skulls. I began to think that even if I were to reconstruct the entire human family tree—from modern humans to the ancient cradle of Africa—sculpting the "true" faces of all our ancestors, I would still not arrive at any comfort. The boulder would roll back to the base of the hill.

It was in that realization that I felt the full weight of the absurd: direct contact with the futility of my actions. My careful measurements and statistical models suddenly appeared to me not as steps toward understanding, but as elaborate distractions—sophisticated ways to avoid facing the void. I had been using science as others use religion or politics or art—as a shield against the terrifying freedom that comes with acknowledging that existence precedes essence, that we are thrown into a world without inherent meaning.

I began to think less in equations and measurements, and more about the remains of the beings on my table. Their bones were all that was left of their lives. How did they suffer? Who did they love? What memories of theirs are forever lost in the abysmal fog of time? I began to see that even if I were to perfectly reconstruct their faces, their lives would still be a mystery. They would remain as inaccessible as the internal lives of the living all around me. The Neanderthal's brow ridge might be measurable, but his grief at losing a child, his wonder at the night sky, the particular cadence of his laughter—these would forever elude my calipers.

And then it dawned on me: this striving, too, was a search for an "ultimate narrative"—something meant to give my own life meaning. Something to offer refuge from the weight of the absurd.

In a strange way, the acceptance of death—real, final, unrecoverable death—brought with it a stillness. Not peace, exactly. Not comfort. But a kind of quiet recognition: that this is it. That the people I love will die. That I will die. That no explanation will soften that fact. But that I am here now, alive, able to see, to touch, to pay attention. To bear witness to the lives of the finite beings around me. To relish the privilege of being part of the aggregate of their joy and suffering in the short time we're here—until we're not. And that is enough.

Camus called this acceptance of the dire nature of our existence, paired with the will to go forth authentically in the face of our finitude, the state of revolt. But it felt to me like a state of true presence.

This was the moment my attitude toward the work began to shift—though I didn't realize it yet. It wasn't a change in style or subject matter. It was a change in posture. I was no longer trying to hold death at bay by immortalizing the dead. I was starting to witness the living instead. The question was no longer what did it mean to be human? The question had become: how shall I aim my attention, while I still can?

I looked at the half-finished reconstruction on my work table—the Taung Child, a fossilized skull of a young Australopithecus africanus who died some 2.8 million years ago. I had spent countless hours working on this child's face, working on iteration number 4, trying to bring some semblance of life back to those empty eye sockets. But now I saw with startling clarity: no matter how perfect my reconstruction, this child would remain forever unknown—not just because of the limitations of science, but because of the fundamental inaccessibility of another's experience, whether separated by millions of years or sitting across from me on the commute train.

Yet in this recognition, I found not despair but a curious liberation. If perfect understanding—the kind I had been seeking through measurement and reconstruction—was impossible, then perhaps I could stop treating its absence as a failure. Perhaps the very mystery at the heart of existence—the unknowability of others, the brevity of life, the finality of death—was not something to solve but something to witness. Not a puzzle, but a presence.

The sculpture of the Taung Child would never be "accurate" in the way I had once hoped. But it could be authentic—honest about both what we know and what we don't, what we can see and what remains forever veiled. And in that honesty, perhaps there was a different kind of truth—not the truth of facts, but the truth of our condition: finite beings staring into the infinite, destined to die, choosing to live anyway.