Camus puts these words into the mouth of a tyrant, and that matters. Caligula has just lost someone he loved, and the grief cracks open a demand that the world be other than it is. He wants the impossible. Not a better government or a kinder fate, but the moon itself, pulled down from the sky.

Most of us know this feeling in smaller, quieter ways. A diagnosis that should not have come. A relationship that ended without reason. A Sunday evening when the shape of the coming week feels like a trap. Something in us insists: this cannot be all there is.

Camus does not mock the feeling. He takes it seriously as the very engine of the absurd. The world fails to answer our deepest longings, and that failure is real. But notice where the demand leads Caligula: toward madness, cruelty, and destruction. The desire for the impossible, when it curdles into a refusal to accept any limit, devours everything around it.

The absurd begins in this honest recognition that the world is not enough. What matters is what you do next. You can rage against reality until you destroy it and yourself, or you can let the ache remain, unfulfilled, and still choose to live fully within the world you actually have.