Albert Camus and "The Myth of Sysiphus"

This posting is for Big Frank's brother, Dan. It will no doubt extract from his memory the image of a red international pickup trailing clouds of dust as it roars across North Dakota gravel roads on the way to some sad unpainted barn. In that red truck while Dan drives, and despite his protests, Big Frank reads aloud from Camus' "The Myth of Sysiphus".

The associative links continue. The previous post mentioned the Sysiphusian stuggle and the joy that emerges from persistence. Who better represents this than Sisyphus, the mythical absurd hero sentenced to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain and then watch it descend. Albert Camus, 1957 Nobel Prize winner in literature, wrote “The Myth of Sysiphus and other essays” among many other literary works.

Big Frank now looks at the absurd hero, represented by Sysiphus. Camus writes, in his essay “An Absurd Reasoning”:

I don't know if this world has a meaning that trascends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me -- that is what I understand.

In the face of the impossibility of extracting oneself from this dilemma, there is a way. This is Sysiphus after the rock has rolled down the mountain for the zillionth time, with joy in his heart, picking it up and heading back up the mountain It is, as Camus says not important what is “the best living, but the most living.” This entails “Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given.” And here is where the existentialist and the yogi shake hands, for Camus writes in reference to the life of quantity: “To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. Being aware of one’s life, one's revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.”


From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder. Everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it.

Here are a few more memorable quotations from Camus:

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

Beware of those who say, 'I know this too well to express it'. For if they cannot do so, this is because they do not know it or because of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.

But a single truth, if it is obvious, is enough to guide an existence.