The human search for meaning
Why the question keeps returning, in every century that thinks it has outgrown it.
Each era announces that the question of meaning has been dissolved — by revelation, by reason, by science, by irony. Each era then produces a new literature about it.
The persistence suggests the question is not a gap in knowledge waiting to be filled, but a feature of being the kind of creature that can ask. It recurs because asking is what we do with our situation, not because the answer is late.
Which is a reason to build a library around context rather than conclusions. What helps is rarely a better final sentence. It is seeing how many people have stood in the same place, and what they noticed from there.