Hejinian: "adolescence is the best period of a person's life in which fully to realize the absurdity of the world, its total lack of reason, its recalcitrant and uninvited givenness" (92)
The realization that "particulars are utterly contingent; that they have been tossed into place and that we are merely some of them; that the existence of this specific thing right here at this specific place, now, is insanely arbitrary; that everywhere the haphazard prevails. Selection occurs--after all, we do have this thing here, now--but there are no principles of selection in play."