y rational man is an aberration
and nothing but an aberration.

More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk
about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our
will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this
sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by
saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about
it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human
action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal
disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about
it.

_Meglio oprando obliar, senza indagarlo,
Questo enorme mister del universo!_

"Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of
the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same
Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the
earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory
and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by
the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a
single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods,
surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O
sun, set across the immense frozen waste."

But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting
work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all
attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All
with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are
conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no
longer be reflected in any human consciousness?

Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals,
"Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions
again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No;
art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister
and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no
other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know
nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer
answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is
to say, to nothingness.

To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quota