12 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
stickiness on the face, a coldness and a sweetness in the
throat, a solid at first and yet somehow, too, a liquid, so that
you were never quite sure whether you ate it or drank it;
it was all of these things and yet one thing—an experience,
unique and wonderful.
I don’t know whether this anecdote, if one can call it that,
will strike anyone as having a moral, but it does have one for
me, and it is this : that what we may call the sheer experience
of living from day to day, from hour to hour, from moment
to moment, is somehow beyond any sort of rational explana-
tion. Now, it is precisely with some such idea as this that
existentialism takes its start. I do not mean that it denies to
the intelligence its long-held supremacy since the days of
Descartes, but rather that, like the philosophy of Bergson, it
restricts its role and importance. Certainly, simply by using
his intelligence, man has Ieamed a great deal not only about
the universe but about himself, and between behaviorism
on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other, there is
not much about his conduct for which, on the rational level,
man cannot supply what appears to be a rational explanation.
And yet there is a catch. Somehow, in describing the nature
of ice cream to Claude, my explanation, as rational or as
scientific as it could be, had missed fire. For clearly, the only
thing that could have satisfied Claude was experience itself.
To be sure, it is plain common sense to say that words can
never replace actions, and we are all familiar with the adage
about sticks and stones. But if this is true, if somehow there
is a profound antinomy between our actions and our explana-
tions, if man is not one but two, a creature who acts and a
creature who reasons, then man himself contains a mystery
that can never be ultimately dispelled, and it is the mystery
of his sheer capacity to behave in particular ways in particular