Imagining Sisyphus Happy
A hero’s take on an ancient myth teaches us: Character does not predict our destination, it is our destination.
Albert Camus was an Algerian born Frenchman who was the son of a maid who became a national level soccer player. After the Nazis took over Europe, he became then became a commando and editor of the French Resistance’s newspaper “Combat.” He was also a novelist and after his publication of the book length essay “The Rebel” in 1951 he became, in 1957, the 2nd youngest ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” in 1942 appeared in a Europe being strangled by homicidal maniacs who thought themselves Nietzschean Supermen. It assumes a destiny more shared and, for the most privileged, more humble than Nietzsche’s elitist nihilism. It proceeded and informed “The Rebel.” It takes up the classic myth of Sisyphus about the best of men condemned to eternally roll a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back. I think it is among the greatest if not the greatest expression of European culture in essay form. It is candid, searching, magisterially learned, rigorous, indelibly imaginative and humble. Most of all it is magnificently heroic.
Unfortunately for Camus, he was not blessed with personal experience that enabled him to recognize G-d’s love. And Camus would die young speeding like an adolescent in a new sports car with his publisher at age 46. But perhaps the deathless spirit of unrelenting and creative love was operating through Camus’s rigorous, imaginative and war tested intellect to lite a lamp for the many who have not recognized G-d’s love.
The full form of “The Myth of Sisyphus” is not recorded below. It begins, bracingly, by asserting that suicide is philosophy’s main problem and whether or not life was worth living its first and foremost question. Camus was a profound student of Greek philosophy and he took up this bracing question in one of the darkest years of the 20th century. Camus concludes his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” asserting that we can find the redemption we need in the face of absurd cruelty if we can imagine Sisyphus superior to his fate and, essentially, happy.
Prior to his concluding crescendo, Camus quotes Sophocles in the Greek classic Oedipus concluding that because of the age and nobility of his character: “all is well,” despite his blindness and wildly troubled world. Then Camus concludes that we must similarly imagine Sisyphus taking up his thankless, eternal, task as happy. In this way Camus agrees — without acknowling it — with that most ancient pre-Socratic thinker, Heraclitus that “character is destiny.” It is superior to fate. Character does not predict our destination; it is our destination. But I can’t do this luminous essay justice. If you get 15 minutes, become a student of Camus and this essay which is a triumph of the spirit of love expressed through a man who knew the full depravity of this fallen world and was a genius with language and symbol which he sent into battle to help smash Nazism and, later, Communism.
And as Camus expounds on Sisyphus as the symbol of man’s rebellion against arbitrary and even malicious fate, think about how Camus — who claimed to have learned his ethics more in sports than in war or decades of philosophy — would later write in The Rebel:
“Man’s solidarity is based upon rebellion and rebellion, in its turn, finds its only justification in this solidarity.”
And imagine us as Sisyphus happy, together, damned but loving and heroic. And — if only Camus could see it — through the love of a G-d capable of suffering with us, able in all circumstances to embrace an endlessly creative and more complete redemption that explodes both the boulder and the mountain.
