Camus called this property of matter its ‘denseness’. Confronted by matter in its raw forms, he wrote, ‘strangeness creeps in’: perceiving that the world is ‘dense’, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman . . . the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.
